[Zipperfish]

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Then I remembered how we as settler Canadians can truly help out, particularly in these cases.

That's a very biased term, and as I've sad before, you need to speak for yourself and only yourself when using said term. You want to consider yourself a 'settler Canadian'? Fine, do that. Just don't paint others with that brush.

I'm not a 'settler'. I didn't arrive on a boat. I was born here, and I'll thank you to leave it at that.

-J.

So you demand not to be called a settler, but when Inuit people demand not to be called Eskimos, you take offence? Why do you get to decide how you should be addressed but they don't?

[Thanos]

Seems though that with the transition in terminology from "indian" to "Native" to "indigenous" and now to "First Nations" there's been more than a fair accommodation for how Natives want to be referred to.

As for me call me an Anglo-Canadian or a Euro-Canadian if you want. It's a hyphenated age we're stuck in so I can learn to live with terms like that. "Settler" or "colonist" though? Them's fightin' words, mate. Use them on me with malice attached and my brakes on helping out or even giving a damn about some of these issues will be slammed on very hard and very quickly.

[Zipperfish]

Thanos Thanos:

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Then I remembered how we as settler Canadians can truly help out, particularly in these cases.

That's a very biased term, and as I've sad before, you need to speak for yourself and only yourself when using said term. You want to consider yourself a 'settler Canadian'? Fine, do that. Just don't paint others with that brush.

I'm not a 'settler'. I didn't arrive on a boat. I was born here, and I'll thank you to leave it at that.

-J.

This I agree with 100%. Call me a settler and any sympathy or willingness to help out dies pretty damn quick. It's a loaded term with only one aim in mind, to provoke undeserved guilt. And it usually backfires badly too, because when I see it or hear it all that happens is that I get very angry.

I have zero white guilt. I have Canadian guilt. I've always been a proud Canadian, and the crimes against indigenous peoples were either directly perpetrated or abetted by Canada, so in order to identify as a Canadian, I have to accept that.

Really there's a lot of silly stuff going around. I was reading one the other day to the effect that white people had some kind of genetic defect that made them violent. This was an academic. Well, she has been edumacated beyond all possible usefulness.

It's kind of funny, I lived in England during grade school. History then was memorizing the dates of the great battles, from Hastings to Agincourt to the War of the Roses, to the Battle of Britain. Blood and guts history. Then the progressives (i don't use this term disparagingly, as I'm usually one of them) got a hold of the curriculum and next thing you know the Vikings were really traders and Genghis Khan advanced the cause of mercantilism.

So when I moved to Canada, that's how I was taught Canadian history. Politics and great social movements. Yet more evidence that the left and right have changed places over the last 40-50 years is that the progressives want a return to blood and guts history.

[Zipperfish]

Thanos Thanos:

Seems though that with the transition in terminology from "indian" to "Native" to "indigenous" and now to "First Nations" there's been more than a fair accommodation for how Natives want to be referred to.

As for me call me an Anglo-Canadian or a Euro-Canadian if you want. It's a hyphenated age we're stuck in so I can learn to live with terms like that. "Settler" or "colonist" though? Them's fightin' words, mate. Use them on me with malice attached and my brakes on helping out or even giving a damn about some of these issues will be slammed on very hard and very quickly.

Personally I've always hated Caucasian. I worked at a hotel run by Chinese nationals in downtown Vancouver as a young man (as a night auditor, which will fuck up anybody, by the way). My manager told me "We only hire Caucasians for the front desk." Caucasian? I don't even know what the fuck that is.

[Thanos]

I've never been that proud to be a Canadian. I mean, I don't hate the place for the most part. I respect the previous generations for the most part, especially the ones who served in the wars. I think my alienation comes from being an Albertan though, where we've been excluded for so long from so many things that people in the other provinces take for granted. Like most of the time we're barely tolerated here, and only for our money, and more often than not we're treated like the family embarrassment if not outright detested. Spend your life this way, feeling targeted for mockery and malice based on nothing more than the place you live in, and it gives you different perspective on things.

That's why I've said many times, including several times in this thread, that Canadian smugness and complacency is pretty disgusting at the best of times. When Bono from U2 told Paul Martin "the world needs more Canada!" to me that was the worst thing anyone could have said to us. It was the equivalent of giving a lifetime supply of heroin to a junkie just because Canada has been addicted for far too long to it's false image of near-sainthood. Boosting egomania in order to satisfy a country obsessed with thoroughly false self-image is a really bad thing to do.

If there's one good to come out of discovering a mass grave full of dead children at a residential school then maybe it'll come in the form of once and for all time finally bursting this ridiculous inflated head Canada's had for far too long. Like, maybe live up to the words that never stop getting spouted about our precious (and precocious) "goodness". Hearing this constantly is, at a minimum, very boring. And self-defeating too, especially when moments like this happen and the country finds out the hard way what a load of pure crap it is that we've been feeding to ourselves for far too long.

[Scape]

As a maritimer the bitching and moaning between Ontario and Quebec while we got scraps (if anything) was always seen as inherent to the dichotomy of Canada. I can relate to the western isolationism but at least you guys has oil and that space between you and Ottawa is not all that bad. You get to do a lot of what you want on your own.

But in the same way we were looking at scraps the indigenous are removed from the construct that is Canada itself. At least we have a seat at the table they do not even have that. All this squabbling is bringing into stark relief of just how bad they have been treated.

Canada is a middle power, it is not a colonial construct or a newer version of HBC. Responsible government is something we can be proud of. The path to it is long and hard and we have strayed from the path but that doesn't mean it is not a path worth following for ALL Canadians. That's the Canada the world needs more of.

[JaredMilne]

Thanos Thanos:

I've never been that proud to be a Canadian. I mean, I don't hate the place for the most part. I respect the previous generations for the most part, especially the ones who served in the wars. I think my alienation comes from being an Albertan though, where we've been excluded for so long from so many things that people in the other provinces take for granted. Like most of the time we're barely tolerated here, and only for our money, and more often than not we're treated like the family embarrassment if not outright detested. Spend your life this way, feeling targeted for mockery and malice based on nothing more than the place you live in, and it gives you different perspective on things.

...

If there's one good to come out of discovering a mass grave full of dead children at a residential school then maybe it'll come in the form of once and for all time finally bursting this ridiculous inflated head Canada's had for far too long. Like, maybe live up to the words that never stop getting spouted about our precious (and precocious) "goodness". Hearing this constantly is, at a minimum, very boring. And self-defeating too, especially when moments like this happen and the country finds out the hard way what a load of pure crap it is that we've been feeding to ourselves for far too long.

One of our biggest flaws as a country is claiming all these great virtues and then utterly failing to live up to our big talk.

I write and post a lot of the stuff I do specifically because I love Canada and I want it to actually live up to its big talk. And part of that involves learning about the awful parts of our history and trying, as much as possible, to correct them.

You bring up the alienation you feel as an Albertan, and with damn good reason. That's actually something a lot of different people in Canada have in common. Like Scape mentioned, some Maritimers feel that way. So do some Quebecois, and (rather obviously) a lot of Indigenous people do too, whether they're First Nations, Inuit or Metis. That's the kind of common ground I'm trying to find, and maybe from there find a way forward.

Scape Scape:

As a maritimer the bitching and moaning between Ontario and Quebec while we got scraps (if anything) was always seen as inherent to the dichotomy of Canada. I can relate to the western isolationism but at least you guys has oil and that space between you and Ottawa is not all that bad. You get to do a lot of what you want on your own.

But in the same way we were looking at scraps the indigenous are removed from the construct that is Canada itself. At least we have a seat at the table they do not even have that. All this squabbling is bringing into stark relief of just how bad they have been treated.

Canada is a middle power, it is not a colonial construct or a newer version of HBC. Responsible government is something we can be proud of. The path to it is long and hard and we have strayed from the path but that doesn't mean it is not a path worth following for ALL Canadians. That's the Canada the world needs more of.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

I write and post a lot of the stuff I do specifically because I love Canada

So, you express your 'love' of Canada by painting a majority of Canadians and racists? That's one hell of a way to show affection.

*sarcasm*

-J.

[DrCaleb]

[DrCaleb]

Edmonton city council votes to rename Grandin LRT station, cover mural of bishop

[DrCaleb]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Edmonton city council votes to rename Grandin LRT station, cover mural of bishop

No wasted time. The mural has been covered.

[DrCaleb]

The head of the statue of Egerton Ryerson now on a spike at Land Back Lane in Caledonia, Ont.

[housewife]

I’m of two minds on all this reaction. Everyone is reacting like they finally get it but it’s just the tip of the shit pile. The pile didn’t stop stuff is still happening CPS is still taking kids!! The Indian agents were still around in the 60’s and yeah by then it was harder then for them to be petty dictators but shit still happened. I remember as a kid hearing of one quietly removed because he was raping in a government owned vehicle. I don’t have any faith that he was changed. Kids are still dying, police are still refusing to take reports and people say oh no it couldn’t be because they are native. A young girl disappeared she had good grades was in the cadets was planning on going reg once she graduated. No one would take the report!! It’s been years she didn’t run away she took no money nothing. She’s one of the missing. Or the mother told that she couldn’t report her daughter missing “she’s probably out partying” she is part of the murdered. This shit is still happening a disaster in the 40’s the everyone in the area was helped by the government but then the Indian agents says to the reserve that aid was your settlement for the land. Years later the government says it was a deal. Was there more to the deal? Did the Indian agents steal the real settlement? Who knows who cares? All we hear is well it didn’t happen in my life and you know what we don’t care there’s no recourse for our grievances. The residential schools were closed in the 90’s. There’s a lot of people who still remember. Or the reserves still fighting for clean drinking water. Hell I’m still not sure if my grandmother’s first name was given to her by her parents or the school. Fun fact instead of dealing with having a large group with the same name they changed it. The attending medical personnel filled out and filed the paperwork for births. It was a great game to make the names funny. Not to mention the guy who died waiting in the er cause everyone thought he was drunk. This shit is still happening all over Canada today. And we get “oh no that was a long time ago, I didn’t have anything to do with treats or the treatment of natives. It’s not happening today”. Or the ever popular they just want money throw some more money on the problem. FFS where do you think the northern reserves learnt the dictatorship concept from. There was a power void and someone stepped in and did what he was taught. But as pointed out already the news cycle will turn to something else the next unmarked graves will get less news coverage the third will get even less until it’s just a footnote story. And we will be back to people saying I don’t understand the natives get everything why are they so mad. How much more do they want we can’t just keep throwing money at them. Why don’t they just leave? And other unhelpful shit.

You do realize that many are too afraid to ask for help right? My niece asked for help they took the baby she was young and native. Funny how once he was in the system they said with his medical problems and feeding tube I need help and got it!!!! She did get him back but it was a fight. These stories are echoed everywhere and the moral of the story is always you will be crushed. Very few have happy endings. It’s frustrating to see that it was a surprise to so many

[DrCaleb]

housewife housewife:

I’m of two minds on all this reaction. Everyone is reacting like they finally get it but it’s just the tip of the shit pile. The pile didn’t stop stuff is still happening CPS is still taking kids!!

Yup. There are more First Nations in government care right now than were ever in the Residential Schools. Kids keep being taken under 'apprehension orders' from mothers shortly after birth. No one even tries to keep kids with families if they are first nations. And when they are 18, they are out on the street with no skills and no way to take care of themselves.

It's no wonder why the homeless population is mostly first nations people.

[bootlegga]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

housewife housewife:

I’m of two minds on all this reaction. Everyone is reacting like they finally get it but it’s just the tip of the shit pile. The pile didn’t stop stuff is still happening CPS is still taking kids!!

Yup. There are more First Nations in government care right now than were ever in the Residential Schools. Kids keep being taken under 'apprehension orders' from mothers shortly after birth. No one even tries to keep kids with families if they are first nations. And when they are 18, they are out on the street with no skills and no way to take care of themselves.

It's no wonder why the homeless population is mostly first nations people.

I don't know about other provinces, but Alberta does try to keep children with their families, even if it's to their detriment in some cases.

I had a friend who was a foster mother and she was amazing, treating foster kids the same as her own children. She raised a First Nations baby from six months and desperately wanted to adopt him, but when the province found distant relatives, they shipped him away from her at age six to live on a remote reserve with a family that only wanted him for the monthly stipend the government gave him. She fought hard to get him back and when she finally did two years later, his growth was stunted (lousy diet), his development slowed (didn't go to school), and several other kids in the home were already addicted to drugs and/or alcohol.

He's now living a much better life away from that toxic environment.

The foster care program has lots of problems on both sides of the custody issue.