Aboriginal-bashing

Some Quebec nationalists believe the English-Canadian press is Quebec-bashing, as they call it. They comb the English-Canadian press for anything that can be considered to be anti-Quebec, find a dozen or so articles written over the past fifteen years, then claim that these articles represent a pattern on the part of the entire English press of smearing Quebec whenever possible.

As you will recall, Mordecai Richler was considered to be Quebec-bashing when he suggested that la revanche du berceau had not been a wholesome development in Quebec history. You can also be considered to be Quebec-bashing if you disagree with the government of Quebec, as the city of Westmount was considered to be when it opposed, along with many francophone municipalities, a project of amalgamation of municipalities.

The idea is that Quebec-bashing is part of a campaign to make Quebeckers look incapable of managing their own affairs, and therefore unready for sovereignty (whatever that might eventually turn out to be). Granted, the ignorance of Quebec displayed in the English-Canadian press is sometimes staggering, and if some people see it as a campaign against Quebec I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Also granted, some members of the English-Canadian press corps have formidable hates on for Quebec.

However, English-Canadians are well aware that Quebec has been managing its own affairs for 140 years. There is another group, though, which the English-Canadian press is bashing constantly, with the effect, if not the goal, of implying that it is incapable of self-government.

That group is aboriginals, and in particular members of First Nations. English-Canadian news coverage of aboriginals almost exclusively depicts them as ravaged by social problems and incapable of managing their own lives. On February 5, 2008, I did a search on the Google News Canada English-language site for the word “aboriginal” and the phrase “first nations.” The stories I found were overwhelmingly negative. They dealt with:

• a policing crisis on reserves,
  
• aboriginal drug addiction,
  
• the inability of some aboriginals to manage their compensation payments for abuse at residential school,
  
• the “growing and urgent needs of the aboriginal population”¹,
  
• discomfort felt by aboriginal students at university,
  
• rundown reserves,
  
• aboriginal unemployment,
  
• aboriginal alcoholism (you’ve been waiting for that one, I bet),
  
• the impeachment of the grand chief of the Dehcho First Nations of the Northwest Territories,
  
• the possibility of a shutdown of the First Nations Technical Institute on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario,
  
• the inflated remuneration paid the chief of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba,
  
• the refusal of a group of Roman Catholic bishops to apologize for abuse at residential schools, or to promise to bring abusers to justice.

Aboriginals are depicted in the English-Canadian press as people who are overwhelmed by the pressures of modern society, and unable to cope with these pressures themselves. Lurking behind this depiction are two inferences:

1. that maybe it’s best for Indians to continue to be segregated on reserves, and
   
2. that these problems are so huge that they can only be solved by Big Daddy, the government.

Well, the government’s been doing a fine job so far, eh? As far as I can make out, government policy towards the First Nations is to keep the chiefs happy. They do audit band councils, but the well-being of the ordinary citizens of the reserves, and of those members of First Nations who live off the reserves, is not a prime concern. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why conditions on most reserves are so abominable, and why the average income of Indians living off reserves is so low.

As for the Métis, the government looked the other way in the late nineteenth century when land reserved for them under the Manitoba Act was being given to white farmers instead. The Inuit were for decades the victims of daft federal schemes which imperilled their survival – for example, moving them to places where they could no longer hunt.

In short, the aboriginal peoples have been wards of government for over two hundred years, and its tender care has rewarded them with shorter lifespans, lower incomes, and higher suicide rates than the rest of us. And now we want the government to do more.

So, you may ask, what else can we do? Well, we could start trying to like aboriginals. We could ask ourselves why we have an apartheid system for Indians. Could it possibly be that we don’t want to have them among us? And why would we not want to have them among us? Could it possibly be that we consider them racially inferior? In this day and age?

Yep. It sure could. It could be that our long history of acting as if aboriginals were children, and the lack of success we’ve had when acting on this assumption, has left us with the idea that our approach failed because aboriginals are bad children, evil children, who are best encouraged to stay in the north or on their reserves where they can do the least harm.

If we are to overcome the current poisonous state of race relations in Canada, we could start by treating aboriginals as our equals. That would mean, for example, dismantling the apartheid system erected by the Indian Act. What do we do after that? I don’t know. It’s not as if we’ve ever had the experience of treating aboriginals as equals before. However, I’m pretty sure that whatever we try will have no chance of failing as catastrophically as the approach we’ve been taking so far.

Aboriginal-bashing © 2008, John FitzGerald