What to do

Understanding the past should be the foundation of planning the future

I am big on history, but not on its rewriting, and not on collective punishment for the mistakes or even the crimes of the past. Collective punishment is not justice, but a tool of political manipulation and control.

In my last post, I was trying to make the point that cheap virtue signaling is not the right answer to our past problems, but a likely cause of future ones.
Making that point still left me with a few nagging questions stewing in a boiling pot of indignation. Thinking about the problem, I cannot stop myself from asking some basic questions, questions that every thinking person, especially the ones pictured above should be asking.

What should we have done? What could we have done? What were the options and the alternatives?
What were our roles, responsibilities and limitations? What was the cost of doing nothing?
What were our moral obligations then? What are they now?

What is it exactly that we are doing today? Is it any better than what we were doing in the past?
Are the natives today any better off? If yes, isn’t that the success of past policies? If no, isn’t that the failure of present ones? When we examine the past shouldn’t the understanding we gain be the foundation of the present and future policies?

All of which leads to the questions of our vision: what is the solution? How do we see the place of natives in Canadian society? Will they ever be part of Canadian society? Do we want them to be? What does it mean to be part of Canadian society?  Should they have more or less rights than the rest of us? How about those who chose to integrate? Will they, by this act, become guilty of the ‘crimes’ of the majority?
A whole lot of natives worked at the residential schools. Were they victims or accomplices?

Is there any place in the world or any time in history where and when this coexistence is or was done right? Is there a model that we can follow?
The Khoisan of South Africa? The Tuaregs of the Sahel? The Sami of Finland and Norway? The Roma, anywhere? The Māori of New Zealand? The Aboriginals of Australia? Any place in Latin America?

Now, I want you to stop here for a second and tell me: can you name any of the Australian native tribes? Can you name just three of the Canadian tribes and their traditional territories? Can you tell me the difference between the Khoikhoi and the San? The Maori and the Moriori?
Now, make a wild guess and tell me what percentage of the people in the picture above, or the politicians voting on policies concerning Canadian natives, can answer these questions.

How can we possibly create good policies without knowing what we are aiming for?
How can we possibly have a vision without properly understanding the past or being honest about the present?

The past

The past is messy, cruel and harsh. When European civilizations started to expand into the rest of the world, they were stunned by the cruelty and violence they encountered. They called them savages for a reason. Tribal existence was never peaceful. If you drive across Canada, you will encounter a number of memorials to our native past. Strangely, they are all about violence, conflicts and wars between various tribes. Hunter/gatherer existence was never easy. It came with a low life expectancy, high child mortality, diseases, hunger and a constant fight for survival.

The lives of European settlers were not much better by today’s standards, but still far above those of the natives. The residential schools were offering the standards of the time for any child in similar circumstances. When my parents were born, compulsory education was just four years, and that was less then a hundred years ago. (They were both born in 1929)
Most people have no idea how far we came just in the past one hundred years, and here we are talking about almost two hundred. The first residential school was established in 1831.

Now picture yourself in that time. What would you do? What would you advocate?

Beginning in the 1870s, both the federal government and Plains Nations wanted to include schooling provisions in treaties, though for different reasons. Indigenous leaders hoped Euro-Canadian schooling would help their young to learn the skills of the newcomer society and help them make a successful transition to a world dominated by the strangers. With the passage of the British North America Act in 1867, and the implementation of the Indian Act (1876), the government was required to provide Indigenous youth with an education and to assimilate them into Canadian society.

The federal government supported schooling as a way to make First Nations economically self-sufficient. Their underlying objective was to decrease Indigenous dependence on public funds.

(from: Residential Schools in Canada | The Canadian Encyclopedia)

Which one of these goals was evil? Even if you consider the one that is pictured as self-serving by the government, self-sufficiency. The point, in case you missed it, is that the residential schools were not forced on, but demanded by the natives.

The future    

I do not know what the future of Canadian natives should be, but self-sufficiency should most definitely picture into it. That part of the goal, as I pointed out in my previous post, definitely turned out to be a failure. Natives are more dependent on the rest of us today than they ever were.

I can perfectly imagine a world of coexistence where wise natives are teaching us about living in harmony with nature; but unfortunately, all they can show us today is the horrors of dystopian welfare dependence.

I am not blaming them, it is all our fault, but changing it would require some serious self reflection and a coherent vision of the alternative.

The present

When I look at the picture above, I despair.

Who  are these people? What is the point of the protest? What do they actually want? Why are they muzzled? Where did they get their orange T-shirts? The ideas for their signs? Who organized them?
What is the role of the policemen there? The protection of the protesters from the intolerant rest of us or the other way around?

While I cannot know for sure, I would be willing to bet that they are mostly government employees who are in one way or another compensated for their participation.
While I cannot possibly know, I also suspect that the people carrying signs saying “every child matters” are the same who would carry signs in the next protest in support of abortion rights.

I despair seeing the carefully orchestrated and well managed ‘spontaneity’. It reminds me of the times when I was ordered out onto the streets to protest the Vietnam war in communist Hungary.
I am also puzzled by the muzzles, that other sign of compliant submissiveness. What is the meaning of the apparent contradiction (between a rebellious protest and the signaling of submission)? Is there a message in it? That the compliant sheeple do as they are told while protesting what they are ordered to protest? ‘Baa’ and bleat when their ‘shepherds’ tell them to?

What I see is anything but morality. It stinks of staging, it stinks of planning.
What I see is cheap virtue signaling, distortion of the past; corrupt manipulation of the present and a visionless, more-of-the-same future.

I don’t know how to change it. Do you?