And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: From: "KOLA International Campaign Office" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: NUNAVUT - The Land Date: Sat, 06 Mar 99 21:10:08 PST Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; X-MAPIextension=".TXT" >From CBC News Online http://newradio.cbc.ca/nunavut/people.html NUNAVUT The People The aboriginal people of Canada's Arctic and sub-Arctic are unique among all North American first nations. Elsewhere on the continent, aboriginal people face a painful struggle regaining cultural identities obscured by centuries of assimilation. But in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, most aboriginal people are not more than a generation or two removed from their ancestral ways of life. Many of the Dene and Inuit elders living today were born in tents in the bush or out on the land. Around most northern breakfast tables and in most workplaces the region's aboriginal languages -- Gwich'in, Slavey, Dogrib, Chipewyan, Inuvialuit, Inuit -- can still be heard. There is something else that distinguishes the 45,000 Dene, Inuvialuit, Metis and Inuit of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. That's their numbers. While other First Peoples have been largely over-run and in some cases have virtually disappeared, in Canada's North, aboriginal people are a dominant political and social force. In the new territory of Nunavut (the Inuit word for "Our Land), 85 per cent of the population is indigenous. This is not to suggest the aboriginal people of the two territories are free from the pressures of assimilation and social decline. Their rates of personal and family dysfunction far exceed those of their non-aboriginal neighbours. Teenage Inuit girls are four times as likely as their white counterparts to become pregnant. Aboriginal infants are three to four times less likely to reach adulthood. Rates of reported sexual assaults among northern aboriginal people are about five times the national average. The average Dene is three times more likely to be incarcerated. The problems extend into northern economic life as well. In the Northwest Territories where aboriginal people make up almost half the population, they account for three quarters of those out of work. In Nunavut, if you're unemployed, there's a 99 per cent chance that you're Inuit. And educational indicators suggest this pattern won't be easily broken: the high school graduation rates of Dene, Inuvialuit, Metis and Inuit are the lowest in the country. It may seem a paradox. Northern aboriginal people remain close to their roots. Their traditional lands are emerging from the 20th century relatively unscathed. By virtue of their numbers, they dominate territorial politics, the only legislatures on the continent where this is the case. Yet the social statistics are so dismal. Aboriginal people blame it on an alien system imposed on them from without, and the rate at which they have been forced to adapt. In the course of two generations at the most, totally nomadic peoples were gathered into permanent communities and deprived of most of the social, economic and spiritual touchstones that gave their lives meaning. In their own homelands, proud hunters and their families were marginalized and made wards of the state. The Inuit of Nunavut, for instance, have only been allowed to vote federally or territorially since the 1960s. And until the early 1980s almost all settlement administrators in both territories were white outsiders reporting not to the local people, but to more other white administrators hundreds of kilometres away. In addition, epidemics brought in by the outsiders decimated entire generations, until modern health care brought the diseases under control in the 1940s and 1950s. Residential schools built by church and government through to the mid-1960s assimilated aboriginal children and estranged them from their families and communities. Northern aboriginal people explain that a few short years of political empowerment can't undo such damage. And they argue that efforts aimed at healing are badly handicapped by the foreign nature of the systems within which they must operate. It's such sentiments as these that give rise to Nunavut, and to the aboriginal self-government initiatives of the Dene, Metis and Inuvialuit. The answer, they say, is aboriginal solutions, to aboriginal problems, delivered though mechanisms truly reflective of aboriginal values. That is Nunavut. That is aboriginal self-government. --end article--- <+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+> In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. <+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+> If ever you wish to be removed from this mailing list, just send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with *unsub* in the text or subject body. <+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+> http://users.skynet.be/kola/index.htm http://kola-hq.hypermart.net <+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+>=<+> "Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere" FREE LEONARD PELTIER!!! NO TELESCOPES ON MT. GRAHAM!!! &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
