Ray, Once again, I'm overwhelmed, so I'll reply with just a few short comments. >Our people have very long memories. Life seems to >mean more to us than most since we don't forgive and >forget. We believe that theft of children, land, mineral >rights, religion and opportunities are not forgiven when >a man's children or grandchildren still benefit from the >original theft with no recompense to the victims. I recognize that there is a great unfairness here. 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'. For the most part, people who signed treaties in the 1820s or 1870s or whenever are not considered to have outstanding claims. However, provisions in their treaties dealing with health, education and other social issues are given modern interpretations. For example, provisions concerning a "medicine chest" are interpreted as a whole battery of health services. I'm not for one moment saying that our claims process has led to fair recompense. I was an advisor to the Council for Yukon Indians during their negotiations in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and do not personally feel that the deal they finally signed was fair recompense. However, by that time they had been negotiating for some twenty years and had reached a point of exhaustion. Probably the least fortunate of Canada's aboriginal people are those who do not have status under the Indian Act and thus do not have access to the many services that our federal government is obligated to provide. Most often, these people have been split off from their land base and cannot demonstrate an outstanding claim which government must negotiate. In the Yukon, it didn't matter whether people had status or not since the Yukon agreement was negotiated to include anyone the community recognizes as being Indian. However, in much of Canada, this is not the case. >1. There was nothing noble about the child rearing >practices of Europe compared to the Americas. The >real expert on this is Mike Hollinshead on this list. >He has done marvelous research on this and has >written about it. I guess it depends on who you're talking about. My father, as a child in Russian Poland, went to work full-time in a weaving mill at age seven. His brothers were hired out to farmers to tend cattle and do odd jobs at about the same age. His sisters became live-in maids when they were about nine or ten. Children had no time to be children, and many parents had no time to rear them. Anyhow, it has been a good discussion. I've said all I can on poor old Marx, poor old Keynes, and our poor old ancestors. Perhaps I will meet them someday in the great beyond. If that happens, I may be able to get closer to the truth. Ed Weick
