[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

No, but not crazy about white supremacists considering the damage they've done. Nazis, Ku Klux Klan. I find the idea that other races are inferior repulsive.

Other races are not inferior. But lots of other cultures are and this is best illustrated by the number of people who flee those cultures to come prosper in ours.

Interesting this comes up because my wife has a friend down the street from us who I got to meet last night after work. Lovely lady. She and her husband are from Chiapas, Mexico but they bristle if they're called Mexican. They're natives and likely descendants of the Maya. They're hardworking people and they made clear that they came here both to escape Mexican oppression and to prosper here.

We've been invited to attend the lady's citizenship ceremony on July 4th next week and we will be there.

She came here to be an American. She and her family were attracted to America because of our culture.

And she and her family are already exceptional Americans.

[Zipperfish]

Coach85 Coach85:

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

I know you are. And if you took the course, you'd find out that Canada, by international law and by its own law (as confirmed by several decisions of the Supreme Court decisions) must recognize indigenous rights and title. It's a legal obligation. Canada, BC and the First Nations in BC are moving forward with this.

And what does all of that mean for our FN people?

NOTHING.

It's a crutch. An excuse. If all of these treaties/land claims, etc were sorted out today, our FN's people would still be living in 3rd world conditions with major issues with booze and drugs.

That's simply not true. I work with a lot of First Nations and I've found that the nations where Canada is involved in meaningful treaty and reconciliation discussions don't seem to have the same issues. I have family who are First Nations and they aren't staggering around drunk. In fact they are doing quite well, despite folks like you who constantly write them off as drunks and beggars.

[Zipperfish]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

No, but not crazy about white supremacists considering the damage they've done. Nazis, Ku Klux Klan. I find the idea that other races are inferior repulsive.

Other races are not inferior. But lots of other cultures are and this is best illustrated by the number of people who flee those cultures to come prosper in ours.

Interesting this comes up because my wife has a friend down the street from us who I got to meet last night after work. Lovely lady. She and her husband are from Chiapas, Mexico but they bristle if they're called Mexican. They're natives and likely descendants of the Maya. They're hardworking people and they made clear that they came here both to escape Mexican oppression and to prosper here.

We've been invited to attend the lady's citizenship ceremony on July 4th next week and we will be there.

She came here to be an American. She and her family were attracted to America because of our culture.

And she and her family are already exceptional Americans.

Well that's an interesting point, because with respect to America and First Nations, it was Europeans fleeing their cultures that first came to settle America to prosper there.

That said, most First Nations I know do have an affinity for Canada (and in the America, down there). WWII wasn't there fight, and they weren't drafted like the white man was, but they still showed up to fight. I think it was a similar situation with Vietnam stateside.

[BartSimpson]

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

Well that's an interesting point, because with respect to America and First Nations, it was Europeans fleeing their cultures that first came to settle America to prosper there.

That said, most First Nations I know do have an affinity for Canada (and in the America, down there). WWII wasn't there fight, and they weren't drafted like the white man was, but they still showed up to fight. I think it was a similar situation with Vietnam stateside.

Reading your comment made me think of this story:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way ... ies-at-102

$1:

Joseph Medicine Crow, a Native American historian and the last war chief of the Crow Tribe of Montana, has died. He was 102.

Medicine Crow earned the title war chief "for his deeds in Europe in World War II, which included stealing enemy horses and showing mercy on a German soldier he could have killed," Montana Public Radio's Eric Whitney reports.

He was also a living link to the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, having heard direct testimony from someone who took part in the battle and later chronicling it as a historian.

"He is the last person alive to receive direct oral testimony from a participant in the Battle of the Little Bighorn: his grandfather was a scout for General George Armstrong Custer," the White House said in a statement when it honored Medicine Crow with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 2009.

"Wearing war paint beneath his uniform and a sacred feather beneath his helmet, Joseph Medicine Crow completed the four battlefield deeds that made him the last Crow war chief," President Obama said during the ceremony. "Dr. Medicine Crow's life reflects not only the warrior spirit of the Crow people, but America's highest ideals."

Medicine Crow, whose Crow Tribe name was "High Bird," was also the first member of his tribe to earn a master's degree, Eric says. He went on to receive several honorary doctorates.

"Joe was a true American hero," Darren Old Coyote, chairman of the Crow Tribe, told the Billings Gazette. "He was a great man in two worlds."

As The Associated Press reports, Medicine Crow became the official historian for the Crow Tribe shortly after returning from service in World War II. The news service adds:

"With his prodigious memory, Medicine Crow could accurately recall decades later the names, dates and exploits from the oral history he was exposed to as a child, [curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Indians Herman] Viola said. Those included tales told by four of the six Crow scouts who were at Custer's side at Little Bighorn and who Medicine Crow knew personally.

"Yet Medicine Crow also embraced the changes that came with the settling of the West, and he worked to bridge his people's cultural traditions with the opportunities of modern society."

[herbie]

Oh FFS this is total bullshit, gov't employees getting a training session to know some of the people they have to deal with. You should be bitching it should've been going on since the 1940s at least and what do you ppl come up with? Stereotype racial comments and the usual bullshit that it's somehow anti-white.
I'd kinda hoped this site would remain one not completely taken over by right wing extremists and white supremacists.

$1:

our FN's people would still be living in 3rd world conditions with major issues with booze and drugs.

So would you if you had no money. So lose the attitude that nothing should be done and anything that is hurts you somehow.

[llama66]

Had no money?! They get BILLIONS.

[BRAH]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

Zipperfish Zipperfish:

White supremacists can't help it. They can't let something like that go by without a reminder of white superiority.

You really hate white people, don't you?

__________________

It's White Liberal Guilt.

[JaredMilne]

Okay guys, sit down and make sure you've got your favourite beverage handy before reading this. This is going to be a long one...

*cracks knuckles*

-Even today, Indigenous people still face fuckingly huge problems not of their own making. They can be brutally murdered just for the "crime" of being the "wrong" ethnicity in the wrong place (Neil Stonechild, Barbara Kentner, Tina Fontaine, among others), they are repeatedly insulted by claims that their culture was somehow backwards and primitive (never mind that they had their own sophisticated forms of governance and constitutions, and while they were brutally fighting each other, Europeans were doing the same on the other side of the Atlantic), and as posters like housewife have said in previous threads, they can be subject to all kinds of subtle discrimination, even when they're just shopping for appliances. If there was no racism in the Colten Boushie case, then why did no less than Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall have to call people out on their racism?

-The causes of a lot of these problems occurred in living memory. Residential schools were open until 1996, when I was going through puberty. They were open and in full swing when my parents were children growing up. The cycle of abuse affected multiple generations, and policies like the Sixties Scoop only made things worse. The Sixties Scoop and modern scoops today were both caused by the fallout of government policy that has fucked so many parents up, but foster care workers are taking kids and everyone solely blames the Natives for supposedly failing as families. It's not like they had much chance to develop

-First Nation communities are underfunded and overstretched. They must pay for their own legal representation and research on land claims cases, they must figure out how to allocate scarce resources that are often underfunded by government (which is why there are issues like moldy houses and boil water advisories), and they must constantly keep Indigenous Affairs updated with spending reports, so there's already accountability for spending in place. Now try doing all that without a trained civil service to help you the way non-native governments do.

-Is there corruption on band councils? Sure there is. But you don't need me to tell you about the corruption that can show up in every level of non-native government from local to state/provincial to federal, and yet we don't condemn white people as a whole for these things. Native peoples are told to leave reserve communities in order to find jobs...but keep in mind that most of them have already done that, and we don't comment on the dangers they can face when they get here. Look how badly people in places like Appalachia or the Maritimes have reacted when they're told they should leave behind the places they grew up to go where the jobs are, implying that their communities deserve to die. People who've made such comments have been pilloried, and rightly so, so why is it kosher to tell Native people this? Are there white people who have too much to drink and make asses of themselves? Yeah, but as Harold Cardinal pointed out they're often just seen as knowing how to enjoy themselves. When a Native guy does it, he's pilloried as just another example of alleged Native drunkenness.

So why do so many non-Natives insist on holding Native people to a higher standard than they do other non-Natives?

-Native people did not agree to be confined to small reserves. That was where they were forced to go, and the land was often less than ideal for farming or other types of development. When they might have been happy to embrace modern technology, they were often prohibited by government fiat. And the level of government control over their lives for decades looks like something out of Soviet Russia or Maoist China than a first-world democracy like Canada. The Treaties were meant to be a way for Native people to share the land with the new arrivals, not give up control over every aspect of their lives to the government, or to assimilate into non-Native society completely. Their connections to particular lands, and their distinct status as nations, are as important to them as Christianity is to many Americans, or being Canadian is to someone like me.

Telling most Native people to give such things up is like asking them to peel off their own skins. By the way, did I mention that Indigenous rights are enshrined in the Constitution and recognized by Canadian courts?

-As someone who works for the government of Alberta, and who will have to take this day course myself, I think it's a terrific idea. Most non-Natives still aren't aware of how badly fucked up the situation is, and just assume that Native people can't get their own shit together. This isn't to demonize non-Natives, make us ashamed of our identities, or anything like that-it's to make us aware of what's happened, and show what needs to be fixed. This is meant to help all Canadians, all of us no matter what our ethnicity, have a more positive, respectful and prosperous relationship.

-Do we need to accept every single thing every Indigenous person says uncritically? Hell no-I have my own questions about everything from jurisdictions in criminal cases to the use of Canadian currency to Indigenous residents of Canadian cities to the functioning of the economy to how we're supposed to pay for things without the tax money generated by mining and resource development.

But maybe we can ask better-informed questions if we actually start trying to understand the Indigenous point of view better, instead of just doing all the talking ourselves.

[llama66]

Good points, I'm for recognizing rights and working with FN people to make a better nation, I do feel so things like the Indian Act have excerbated the plight of many FN people's in Canada (I'm against anything that creates 2 classes of people..). The hard part is at some point, somehow we as a nation need to move past the sons of the past and look to the future...

[Coach85]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

-Even today, Indigenous people still face fuckingly huge problems not of their own making. They can be brutally murdered just for the "crime" of being the "wrong" ethnicity in the wrong place (Neil Stonechild, Barbara Kentner, Tina Fontaine, among others), they are repeatedly insulted by claims that their culture was somehow backwards and primitive (never mind that they had their own sophisticated forms of governance and constitutions, and while they were brutally fighting each other, Europeans were doing the same on the other side of the Atlantic), and as posters like housewife have said in previous threads, they can be subject to all kinds of subtle discrimination, even when they're just shopping for appliances. If there was no racism in the Colten Boushie case, then why did no less than Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall have to call people out on their racism?

People of all colours and creeds are murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Native's are most often killed by other Natives. We know that 70% of Indigenous women are killed by Indigenous men.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

-The causes of a lot of these problems occurred in living memory. Residential schools were open until 1996, when I was going through puberty. They were open and in full swing when my parents were children growing up. The cycle of abuse affected multiple generations, and policies like the Sixties Scoop only made things worse. The Sixties Scoop and modern scoops today were both caused by the fallout of government policy that has fucked so many parents up, but foster care workers are taking kids and everyone solely blames the Natives for supposedly failing as families. It's not like they had much chance to develop

Black people suffered through 400 years of slavery.

The Jews lost 6+ million in the Holocaust.

If we want to talk about historical family devastation and a poor system of roots and culture, we don't have to look far beyond the above.

Point being, lots of people from all over the world and from different backgrounds have had some terrible shit happen in their lives. At some point, we have to take accountability for our own actions.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

-First Nation communities are underfunded and overstretched. They must pay for their own legal representation and research on land claims cases, they must figure out how to allocate scarce resources that are often underfunded by government (which is why there are issues like moldy houses and boil water advisories), and they must constantly keep Indigenous Affairs updated with spending reports, so there's already accountability for spending in place. Now try doing all that without a trained civil service to help you the way non-native governments do.

Resources aren't scarce. We spend billions annually to fund this group. With the accountability act being scrapped by the Liberals, we don't get to see the audits anymore.

Despite being untrained civic servants, as you have suggested the reserves lack, reserves often paid their Band members more than City Councillors in some of Canada's largest cities.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

-Is there corruption on band councils? Sure there is. But you don't need me to tell you about the corruption that can show up in every level of non-native government from local to state/provincial to federal, and yet we don't condemn white people as a whole for these things.

Other levels of government have multiple levels of accountability. These other levels of government are also very diverse and don't contain all 'white people'.

They don't get to play the 'it's racist for you to ask for our books' card when it comes to the finances.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Native peoples are told to leave reserve communities in order to find jobs...but keep in mind that most of them have already done that, and we don't comment on the dangers they can face when they get here. Look how badly people in places like Appalachia or the Maritimes have reacted when they're told they should leave behind the places they grew up to go where the jobs are, implying that their communities deserve to die. People who've made such comments have been pilloried, and rightly so, so why is it kosher to tell Native people this? Are there white people who have too much to drink and make asses of themselves? Yeah, but as Harold Cardinal pointed out they're often just seen as knowing how to enjoy themselves. When a Native guy does it, he's pilloried as just another example of alleged Native drunkenness.

The dangers of leaving the reserve are no worse than staying on the reserve. The stats show that.

Having too much to drink doesn't equate to severe alcoholism which is the case on most of the reserves in Canada.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

-Native people did not agree to be confined to small reserves. That was where they were forced to go, and the land was often less than ideal for farming or other types of development. When they might have been happy to embrace modern technology, they were often prohibited by government fiat. And the level of government control over their lives for decades looks like something out of Soviet Russia or Maoist China than a first-world democracy like Canada.

Indigenous people have fought to keep the current reserve system in place.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

But maybe we can ask better-informed questions if we actually start trying to understand the Indigenous point of view better, instead of just doing all the talking ourselves.

More questions and those that are formed with a better understanding are always helpful. However, the Indigenous people also have to come to the table prepared to tackle real issues that plague their community without always looking to place blame for all the problems.

[herbie]

Nobody's placing blame on anyone with the subject in hand. I got sent on a course on how to deal with difficult customers FFS. It was down in Vancouver so they flew me there, paid for hotel, dinner, breakfast, lunch and return flight 25 years ago. Private company did that.
Also the whole crew got a half day on cultural sensitivity when no one but me would "put some goddam rag over their head" just to service inside a temple.
You're all whining about someone being trained to do the fucking job they're getting paid to do.

[Freakinoldguy]

fifeboy fifeboy:

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

herbie herbie:

Calling out your racist statement. No need to be Capt. Obvious and call you names when you so openly post the evidence.

So there's no plethora of alcohol treatment programs for the FN in Alberta?

See, you may not like that particular truth and it might offend you that I underlined it but it is a truth all the same.

If you really think it's racist to call out the alcoholism amongst the FN then you should call the NDP and demand that they immediately defund and close all those demeaning and racist alcohol treatment centers and programs.

Don't forget to close the drug treatment programs, too. Just tell them it's 'racist' to mention the FN taste for meth.

1- I live in Saskatchewan .
2- I have several Aboriginal children who have alcohol problems.
3- they have been in treatment.
4- most treatment programs are for anyone who needs them.
5- some, especially those on reserves or run by the Metis Society , are mainly for Aboriginal People.
6- and irrelevant to this specific topic, most Aboriginal People I have met are the survivors of various atrocities perpetrated by Canadian culture .
-residential schools or are the children or grandchildren of residential school survivors.
-treated worst than dogs by white society
It’s no wonder there is a substance abuse problem amongst our native populations.
And Bart, it may not be racist to mention Aboriginal People when talking about treatment, but it is racist to blame them for having the problem .

One reason why there are so many failures in native alcohol and dug addiction rehab programs is that they refuse to accept "ANY" responsibility for their plight and as every recovering addict and alcoholic knows, without accepting the simple premise that as an individual you're responsible for your own actions, they'll never move on.

It's one thing to keep complaining about how unfairly they were treated in the past but it's a whole other one for people to excuse any responsibility the have for their present condition and until we quit making those excuses for today's problems by continually trotting out the last century's atrocities and saying white people are responsible they're going to stay in a perpetual state of victim hood which is what I think some people actually want.

[martin14]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Okay guys, sit down and make sure you've got your favourite beverage handy before reading this. This is going to be a long one...

Well, that was remarkably short, compared to your normal Laurentian posts.

$1:

If there was no racism in the Colten Boushie case, then why did no less than Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall have to call people out on their racism?

So, you're saying that if Coulten was a white guy trying to steal stuff,
the gun would have seen a white guy and refused to go off accidentally ?
Because that's pretty racist, coming from you.

$1:

(which is why there are issues like moldy houses and boil water advisories),

No.
Those issues happen because when you give people free stuff, they don't take care of it.
White people get moldy houses too, but they fix them because owners have pride
of ownership. People who just occupy houses tend to treat them like crap.

$1:

-Is there corruption on band councils? Sure there is. But you don't need me to tell you about the corruption that can show up in every level of non-native government from local to state/provincial to federal, and yet we don't condemn white people as a whole for these things.

Yes we do. We have a system that tries to hunt corruption down and fix it.
The reason the bands are corrupt is because the government permits it, and does nothing about it.

$1:

Are there white people who have too much to drink and make asses of themselves? Yeah, but as Harold Cardinal pointed out they're often just seen as knowing how to enjoy themselves. When a Native guy does it, he's pilloried as just another example of alleged Native drunkenness.
So why do so many non-Natives insist on holding Native people to a higher standard than they do other non-Natives?

?? Whatever you are drinking, please stop.

And the 'alleged drunkeness' ?
You are going to deny the statistics about the levels of alcohol and drug abuse on reserves ?

$1:

-Native people did not agree to be confined to small reserves. That was where they were forced to go, and the land was often less than ideal for farming or other types of development.

Yes they did. $5 a year.
Now, Zippy will now come in all shouty and whiny and cry about BC, but BC isn't Canada.

$1:

And the level of government control over their lives for decades looks like something out of Soviet Russia or Maoist China than a first-world democracy like Canada.

Well now at least we starting to discover the real source of the problem...... the Federal government, and it's proxies in the Provincial government.

$1:

As someone who works for the government of Alberta,

It is very much worth noting the 2 people ITT who are the most

'more money, more money' types..... are government employees.

Very telling indeed.

[JaredMilne]

Coach85 Coach85:

People of all colours and creeds are murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Native's are most often killed by other Natives. We know that 70% of Indigenous women are killed by Indigenous men.

Or maybe not...

$1:

RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson confirmed the number citing their database — even though the report issued by the Mounties last year had not noted the ethnicity of perpetrators. But Paulson added a caveat.

“It is not the ethnicity of the offender that is relevant, but rather the relationship between the victim and offender that guides our focus with respect to prevention,” Paulson wrote to Martial.

Most homicides involving female victims of all ethnicities involve family or intimate partner violence, Paulson added, but the rate is actually lower for aboriginal women — 62 per cent compared to 74 per cent for non-aboriginal women.

In its follow-up report, the RCMP said in the past couple of years, the offender was known to the victim in every solved homicide of an aboriginal woman in RCMP jurisdictions.

Since the RCMP found that aboriginal women are significantly more likely than other women to be killed by an acquaintance — 17 per cent of the aboriginal female homicides involved casual acquaintances and 7 per cent criminal relationships — uncertainty surrounds hundreds of cases.

And, according to Pam Palmater...

$1:

I hope the RCMP know at least this much about the legislated identity of Indigenous peoples in Canada (hint: it's in the Indian Act). For those that only use "Indian status", that would exclude all the non-status Indians, Métis, and Inuit individuals in Canada. The most recent National Household Survey indicated that there were 1,400,685 Aboriginal people in Canada and only 637,660 of them were registered Indians. That leaves 763,025 individuals (more than half the Aboriginal population) excluded from possible identification as Aboriginal by RCMP standards.

...

The RCMP's exact words to Treaty 6 Grand Chief Martial were as follows:

"In considering the offender characteristics, a commonality unrelated to the ethnicity of the victim was the strong nexus to familial and spousal violence. Aboriginal females were killed by a spouse, family member or intimate relation in 62% of the cases; similarly, non-aboriginal females were killed by a spouse, family member or intimate relation in 74% of occurrences."

This statistic confirms that Canadian women are more often killed by their spouse or families than Aboriginal women. Yet, in the second paragraph of this letter, the RCMP explain that despite their bias-free policing policy and despite their confidentiality agreement with Statistics Canada, they would release the sensitive information relating to offenders anyway in order to back up Minister Valcourt's claims that "70% of offenders were of Aboriginal origin".

...

It bears repeating that the RCMP's own assessment of problems in its methodology led them to conclude:

"a high number of Homicide survey reports where the identity of the victim (and/or accused) remained unknown".

Coach85 Coach85:

Black people suffered through 400 years of slavery.

The Jews lost 6+ million in the Holocaust.

If we want to talk about historical family devastation and a poor system of roots and culture, we don't have to look far beyond the above.

Point being, lots of people from all over the world and from different backgrounds have had some terrible shit happen in their lives. At some point, we have to take accountability for our own actions.

It'd be easier if a lot of the problems described by me, Zipperfish and others both on this forum and in a lot of other places were more concretely addressed. The Jews were given their own full-fledged country, while even today black people still have problems with the police, as even a network ABC show like Family Matters was shown.

Coach85 Coach85:

Resources aren't scarce. We spend billions annually to fund this group. With the accountability act being scrapped by the Liberals, we don't get to see the audits anymore.

Despite being untrained civic servants, as you have suggested the reserves lack, reserves often paid their Band members more than City Councillors in some of Canada's largest cities.

Uh huh...

$1:

Like many Canadians, Porter has seen the headlines about oversized salaries — such as the $914,000, including an $800,000 bonus, paid to another B.C. chief, Ron Giesbrecht of Kwikwetlem First Nation, which caused a stir when it was revealed in documents posted online under the First Nations Financial Transparency Act last fall.

However, a Toronto Star analysis of the salaries of chiefs published so far show that the Giesbrecht payment is one of the outliers.

All but 28 of the 582 First Nations subject to the legislation now have their audited consolidated financial statements and schedules of remuneration and expenses posted on the government website, and the data shows the median total of salary and honorarium earned by chiefs in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2014, excluding travel expenses, was $60,000.

While there were five chiefs who took home more than $200,000, excluding travel expenses, there were 42 chiefs who received less than $10,000, including eight who received nothing.

So yeah, a few chiefs earn more than two hundred grand a year...but a greater number than that get paid less than what your typical restaurant wait staff get paid. A few even work for free.

And as for the reserves' resources being overstretched...

$1:

If you truly believe that we have been treated fairly, then I invite you to move to Wabasca and put your children in the provincially run school that is ranked 657th out of 659, or in the band school for elementary students that gets $3,000 to $4,000 per student per year less than the provincial school boards are granted. And you will love the housing that we can provide with the $112.50 per member we get annually. And I bet you thought every Indian got a free house!

How about Attawapiskat, one of the allegedly most infamous examples, courtesy of Chelsea Vowel?

$1:

You see, for non-natives, the provinces are in charge of funding things like education, health care, social services and so on. For example, the Province of Ontario allocated $10,730 in education funding per non-native pupil in the 2010-2011 fiscal year. For most First Nations, particularly those on reserve, the federal government through INAC is responsible for providing funds for native education.

How is this relevant?

It helps explain why the entire $90 million was not allocated to the construction of new houses. That $90 million includes funding for things like:

-Education per pupil
-infrastructure (maintenan­ce, repair, teacher salaries, etc)
-Health care per patient
-Health care, infrastruc­ture (clinics, staff, access to services outside the community in the absence of facilities on reserve)
-Social services (facilitie­s, staff, etc.)
-Infrastruc­ture (maintenan­ce and constructi­on)
-A myriad of other services

These costs are often not taken into account when attempting to compare a First Nation reserve to a non-native municipality. In fact, many people forget that their own health care and education are heavily subsidised by tax dollars as well.

What's the point here?

How much money was actually allocated to housing in 2010-2011? Page 2 of Schedule A (PDF) shows us that out of the $17.6 million in federal funds, only $2 million was provided for housing. Yes, even $2 million would be enough to eight brand new homes, if those funds were not also used to maintain and repair existing homes.

Coach85 Coach85:

Other levels of government have multiple levels of accountability. These other levels of government are also very diverse and don't contain all 'white people'.

They don't get to play the 'it's racist for you to ask for our books' card when it comes to the finances.

Ahem...

$1:

Canada's former parliamentary budget officer says the Liberal government is even less transparent on fiscal matters than the Conservative government it succeeded.

"I don't think it is [more transparent]. The documents — they're not better from a government that promised to be better, more transparent ... there's no more information, perhaps even less information, than what we got from the previous government," Kevin Page said said in an interview CBC Radio's The House.

...


Page, who frequently squared off with the previous Conservative government over their fiscal secrecy, says his concerns about transparency stem from a lack clarity around the deficit figure.

This article shows that Harper wasn't much better. You can't read the whole thing, but the first few sentences show what I mean.

And as for reserve accountability, Pam Palmater points out that there's a lot of that already:

$1:

INAC’s streamlining efforts have not lessened the burden of reporting requirements for First Nations
4.71 The federal government has established many programs and services for First Nations communities. Most of them are delivered through funding arrangements such as contribution agreements that require the submission of reports to obtain funding and to account for funds used. Reporting requirements established by federal organizations can be a significant burden, especially for the many communities that have fewer than 500 residents. INAC and the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat began efforts to streamline reporting by First Nations communities but the efforts have not been sustained.

4.72 In 2002, we looked at the amount of reporting required of First Nations by federal organizations. We estimated that four federal organizations together required about 168 reports annually from each First Nations reserve. We found that many of the reports were unnecessary and were not in fact used by the federal organizations. We followed up on this issue in 2006. At that time, we found that federal departments had made little progress on meeting our recommendations to reduce reporting requirements. In our 2006 follow-up audit, we reported that INAC’s officials told us that the Department obtained more than 60,000 reports a year from over 600 First Nations communities. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat analyzed the extent of federal involvement with First Nations and confirmed the seriousness of the problem we had identified in 2002.

Coach85 Coach85:

The dangers of leaving the reserve are no worse than staying on the reserve. The stats show that.

Having too much to drink doesn't equate to severe alcoholism which is the case on most of the reserves in Canada.

Indigenous people have fought to keep the current reserve system in place.

Which stats are those, if you don't mind me asking? I confess I haven't heard of them.

And if you're wondering why Indigenous people have fought to keep the reserve system in place, it's because the reserves are all that's left of the land bases originally promised to them.

I wrote a two-part essay on Vive Le Canada discussing the Reserve Paradox. Long story very short, the reserves were originally meant to be places where Indigenous people could be "civilized", and shrunk into nothing as their residents were assimilated. Now, though, with assimilation's failure and Indigenous peoples' rights and status stuck in a legal limbo, those same reserves meant to be bases of assimilation are reminders to all of us of Indigenous peoples' rights in Canada, and the promises made to them.

Coach85 Coach85:

More questions and those that are formed with a better understanding are always helpful. However, the Indigenous people also have to come to the table prepared to tackle real issues that plague their community without always looking to place blame for all the problems.

What do you think they've done with everything from the 1970s Red Paper to the 1984 Penner Report to the 1996 Royal Commission to the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission? They've talked about these issues for decades on end, but too few of us are willing to listen.

It'd be easier to ask Indigenous people to stop placing blame if we stopped giving them so much reason to place blame in the first place, and actually act on what they've been repeating ad nauseum for decades, a century and more.

[llama66]

However at some point, there needs to be a solution.. a viable solution to the plight of Indigenous people in Canada. Part of that solution will require both sides to let go of some things and realize looking to the past is no way to move into the future.