Too bad they can't assess liability for lost families,
intellectual capital, land use ideas etc. It seems to
me that you are using the rules of a divorce without
separating.
Better you start with the ideas of justice
and the rule of law as defined by both groups. The
truth is that one group has the power, just as with
the Kurds or the Bahais in Iran, and the other group
doesn't even exist except as a continuing image and
a tumor in the empathy of those who continue to
benefit from the injustice. The problem with such
tumors is that they either make the person inhumane
or they eat at the identity until something terrible
happens that releases the toxin. Something
like a Holocaust, a Nuclear war or a plague to
give the dominant population the same experience.
Often such unconscious functions are masked by
contemporary economic, religious or political myths
and the prove tenacious and impossible to stop even
when the conscious story is removed. The
unconscious is rarely probed for a whole culture.
I've always felt that the story of Noah was an example
of a culture doing that. Noah of course was furious
for some deep unknown reason. A reason so deep
that he had to spend some time back in the water
contemplating the meaning of his unconscious
connections with his spirituality. At one point Jesus
said that someone would have to go back inside
his mother's belly (the water) before he could change
those motivations. But after the catharsis, plague,
war or whatever things change.
After that they go on, just as the Romans did with
the Etruscans. The Christians have a history of
absorbing groups like this and maintaining certain
images. That is not unlike the Iroquois who rescued
a nation that they had defeated and nearly destroyed.
The took in the survivors and incorporated their
ceremonials into their own tradition. That kept
them from feeling bad I guess. It worked for the
Church with the Mithrians and the Italians with the
Etruscans. The Pope's hat is Mithric and the
bull fight is the old ceremony to kill the bull which
they then hung above the door to let everyone
walk under while they received the power in the
blood from the slain bull. The Spanish and the
French have kept the fight but I think the French
no longer kill the bull.
Regards,
REH
Ed Weick wrote:
> In a posting yesterday, I made the point that in Canada "we've
> tried to deal with it via an Aboriginal claims process which is
> intended to define and make explicit the Aboriginal rights
> entrenched in our Constitution as these apply to particular
> groups. This is not a fully satisfactory process since it
> applies mainly to Aboriginal people who did not come under treaty
> during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries and whose
> rights have not therefore been defined. These people are
> considered to have 'outstanding claims'." This is known as the
> "comprehensive claims process". I should have mentioned that
> there is a parallel process for Indian people who have treaties
> but can make the case that certain provisions of their treaties
> have not been honored or have been violated. This is the
> "specific claims process", One specific claims case with which I
> have some familiarity deals with lands in Saskatchewan. The
> Indian Bands of Saskatchewan signed treaties in the 1870s well
> before Saskatchewan became a province in 1905. Lands and
> resources were not transferred from the federal government to the
> Government of Saskatchewan until the 1930s. They were
> transferred on condition that the Province fulfill all
> outstanding land-related treaty obligations. The Province did
> not do so. The result is a recent, and I would surmise, still
> continuing step-by-step, band-by-band, process of determining how
> much additional land the Indian people are entitled to and how
> much monetary compensation this might require in lieu of land. Ed
> Weick
