----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Weick To: Ed Weick Sent: Tuesday, December 06, 2011 6:55 PM Subject: Attawapiscat
Attawapiscat, a small Native community on the shores of James Bay is very much in the news these days because of its sub-standard living conditions. There are many Native communities across Canada with large problems. The following is my take on a community in nothern Saskatchewan I visited while doing a study back in the early 1990s. 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
