Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I spent a few years working on land claims with the Council for Yukon Indians. Only one of the aboriginal people I worked with had a law degree, but all of them were bright and competent, and in one case, extremely bright and competent. He should have been teaching management at Harvard. When in one of our long and complicated meetings we got totally stuck, he'd walk up to the whiteboard, grab a pen, and tell us where we had got to. You're here now, he'd say, and this is where you have to get to, and here are the possibilities of how you get there. Pretty soon, the whiteboard had lines, boxes and notes on it that made sense. When we'd gotten it, he'd sit down and the meeting would proceed. If we got stuck again, he'd get up again, and keep moving us along until we had resolved the issues we were dealing with. An extremely bright young guy.
Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: michael gurstein To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION,EDUCATION' Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 11:57 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: When is contract not a contract? Ray, I don't think there is a contradiction. Some communities, some families, some individuals. what was surprising to me was the apparent numbers of these young people. I already knew the depressing statistics that Ed was pointing to (and that haven't changed all that much in the subsequent 20 years. or in my 30 years since I saw those conditions in Northern Saskatchewan reserves and Metis communities. M From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 7:16 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] Fw: When is contract not a contract? Thanks Ed, how does that square with Mike G.'s view of the new generation of Information savvy young people and the enlightened First Nation's officers? Also, Rayna Green a Cherokee Anthropologist at the Smithsonian did a cultural sketch of the whites in Vermont and New Hampshire and found pretty much the same thing as you found amongst the First Nations Folks. Cabin Fever, too much alcohol and too much time on their hands. She also found a high suicide rate amongst the locals, especially during winter months. Her comment was that when anyone is put into such a claustrophobic situation, lied to and stolen blind with impunity the only thing to do is drink or drugs until this hell is done. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, December 27, 2012 3:29 PM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: [Futurework] Fw: When is contract not a contract? Ray asks when a contract is not a contract. Well, in my opinion, a contract is always a contract. However, much depends on how it is administered and whether there is a neutral authority looking over the shoulders of both sides to ensure that they are giving and getting the deal that has been agreed on. In the context of Canada's Native people, that authority, the federal government, has been one of the parties to the contract and has been in the position to manipulate carrying out the contract to its advantage. It has not always been neutral in supervising the conduct of the contract. As well, it has often been somewhat negligent in ensuring that the contract did what it was supposed to. About twenty years ago, I did a study of the ability of several Native communities in our northern prairies to accept mining development. I spent some time in several communities. Here's what I wrote on one of them: A Symbiotic Community Monday, July 13, 2009 Discussion of the problems of our aboriginal peoples with a friend prompted me to look up something I wrote many years ago while working on a project in the northern parts of one of the prairie provinces. The following is an abridged version of what I wrote. I'd suggest that it applies to many of our aboriginal communities. 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. 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