Ray, you misunderstand. I wasn't referring to all Indian communities in Canada. The community I referred to was one of many in the near north of Canada, one in which the federal and provincial government requirements had got the place and its people stuck. The feds had moved in via the Indian Act and the provinces via the programs they administered -- education, health, welfare etc. My point was that the people had little ability to be themselves and assert themselves. Even their own language, Cree if I recall, was in decline.
I have been to many places in which our Native populations were doing much better. I spent some four years working with Indian people in the Yukon while they were negotiating their land claims. What I saw there was a tremendous resurgence of culture, pride and learning. More recently, I spent a couple of years working with the Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie Delta and Beaufort Sea on the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline which, if and when it is built, would carry natural gas from the delta south. The Inuvialuit had settled their land claims and self-government issues a couple of decades ago and were well organized and thriving. Given the large changes in the lives of their communities, the young of the Yukon and Mackenzie Delta and were doing things that they could not hope to do or even think of a few decades ago. I'll have to take your word for how things are in Brazil. The people I worked with in my favela were mostly of black African origin with some white admixture. They were brought over from Africa because the Indian populations that the plantations originally enslaved had died out because of the diseases the Portuguese had brought with them. However, I didn't get out into Brazilian forests to see what was going on there. I spent some time in Costa Rica a few years ago, and all of the people I worked with there claimed solid Spanish origin. However, I did drive through a small ramshackle community way up on a hillside. Its people were the remnant of a once extensive Quiterrisi culture, I was told. I don't deny what you're saying, but the point I'd make is that the Native people of Canada are far better off in some places than in others. I've met young and not so young Native lawyers and young people working on Ph.Ds. Where ancient grievances have been settled, there's hope. Where they haven't been settled, as in the northern parts of the prairie provinces, there isn't much. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Ray Harrell To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 7:47 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Stuckedness I tried to send the list pictures of my home reservation but the server didn't post them. I have them on PDF if any of you would like for me to send them to your e-mail. Ed, you are talking about me and my home. I have done a lot with my life as has my classmates. I'm really fed up with the attitudes of people who don't know what they are talking about when it comes to human potential and how to develop it. The Indian peoples of Canada have made an attempt to recover and restore the old forestry methods. What Canada seems not to have learned are the lessons that the Portuguese Anthropologists of Brazil have come to know about Indian people. That these peoples are, civilization wise, are not hunter/gather/foragers but are remnants of great populations with fully developed religions, philosophies, languages and relationships to the greater forest that they know in their bones. They were farmers and foresters. Their pedagogy was the basis of Rousseau's book on education. My Aleut Sister who spends her life rescuing these processes amongst her own people would tell you a lot about the pedagogical practices of the Northern Peoples. Lessons that non-Indians don't even know exists. These economic descriptions are an insult to these people who are treated like children by the dominant population and the government. I would recommend that you read some of the more enlightened Brazilian anthropologists who are the leading the way in rediscovering the great civilizations that no one knew existed because one Spanish boat with a few Soldier's floating down the Amazon river killed millions with their germs. The finest agricultural soils in the world are the Terra Preta Soils developed by the Amazon peoples now gone. The stone building techniques, engineering and great agricultural technology that fed Europe and Napoleon's armies from the Inca people are now lost. The growth methods of those peoples that turned the Amazon jungle into a Garden are lost and being further desecrated by the European religion of the marketplace. The Spaniards didn't just burn the books and tear down the government, they deliberately desecrated everything that smacked of what they didn't know or were afraid the world might discover they didn't know. The English simply banned the religions and set out to steal the children sending them to schools to make them good English Nannies and Servants. You seem unwilling to admit the immensity of the tragedy that Europe brought to over 100 million people who in a hundred years would be down to about six million. All in the name of trade and the marketplace. Is it any wonder that the Indian people of Canada would rather sniff gas and die than cooperate? Is it any wonder that the Indian languages in America call Indian people ayvwiyah which means the Real people? I believe you are a man of good will. I do not mean to put this on you but you should understand that unless you live there, can speak the languages fluently, know the stories and the songs and dance with them, you cannot possibly understand. The same is true of Europe. That's why I teach Europeans their own stuff. I had to learn about them or to give into my rage and withdraw. I'm not the only one to walk into the eye of the beast. My good friend Burl Lane from my reservation was the Bassoon section leader in Sir Georg Solty's Chicago Symphony for forty years. He's in the upper 1% of his profession in the U.S. My high school friend Don Johnson was the CEO of the Modine Corporation one of the Fortune 500 companies. My cousin Mickey Mantle played for the Yankees and Gary Brown a French Horn player friend in my high school band was a leading anti-war lawyer for the JAG corps for the Navy during Vietnam and today has a firm in Washington, D.C. I could go on and on about the people I am proud to come from and be a part of. We all came out of the shacks and shanties of the worst Super Fund Toxic waste site in America. So bad and impossible to clean up for the lead and heavy metal pollution that they closed the place down and fenced it off last year. We were all there when the mines were in full bloom. It actually looks picturesque now that there's no more money to be made off of the bodies of Indian children. But we did not capitulate and never gave in! You give in too easily. You would not make a good Indian. But you are a good and civil gentleman and I hope I have not offended you. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 5:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] Stuckedness I've recently argued that people, especially the young, in the poorest classes cannot easily escape the lot they've been given, even if they aspire to a better life. Much of my professional life has involved working on the problems faced by Canada's aboriginal people. Back in about 1990 I undertook a study of communities would be impacted by a uranium mine in the north of one of our prairie provinces. Here's my take on the position of one of those communities. Ed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Undoubtedly, the community had valid economic and social reasons for existing at one time. During the fur and mission era, it serviced a largely subsistence, partly commercial (fur trapping, commercial fishing, casual labor) population that was widely dispersed on the land much of the time. The descendants of that population were drawn into town by a series of government requirements that were imposed mostly during the post WWII era: the requirement that kids attend school regularly; that the school be in the community; that health and hospital services be provided where people live (which was turned around into the requirement that people live where the health and hospital services are provided); that people be housed at national and provincial standards for Indians, and that community physical and service infrastructure exist to support that housing; that people be conveniently located so that welfare and other forms of subsidy could be administered to them; etc. It has become a symbiotic community: All of the institutions have been provided in a single place which in the administrative view is appropriate to the population and that allows government institutions to provide their services conveniently. The people, having lost their independence need the institutions. But the institutions also need the people to justify their existence in the community. Socially, the population maintains many of the values and attitudes of its land based culture. The people continue to try to be hunters, trappers, fishers and foragers, though being those things while living in the community full time is very difficult. So some of the land-based skills and attitudes have been converted to skills that allow survival in town, with foraging for money among the various bureaucracies being an especially useful skill. Such foraging makes economic sense, since the community has no industrial base. The only real income base, now and in future, is government, supplemented by occasional construction, some local business, some fishing, etc. Yet the money that the foragers obtain does not always make good sense socially. Wives often see one purpose in money - feeding the family - but husbands all too often see quite another - having a good time with their friends. This often leads to family violence. The government institutions which service the community are there not only to support and service the population, they are there to change it. They are not really support services in the sense of helping people achieve their own aspirations, they are coercive agents of social change - social engineers. When they put some of the administration of programs into local hands, they nevertheless maintain tight control to ensure that it is their objectives and not those of the local people that are met. The outcome has been a disruption and fragmentation of the community. Many people buy into the institutionally driven values, attitudes and actions, and the old ways get pushed into the background. The elders remain respected as custodians of old memories, but in reality wield little influence. They have taken on the roles of cultural icons, not much more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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