White people want to have it both ways. They want to live in a society that abides by laws and private property rights, but in a place where they had to take the land away from other people.
To be fair, taking land away from people *is *what their ancestors have always done.
You’d have to go back damned far to find any of my ancestors who took land from anyone, and certainly not any part of North America. My ancestors got here long after the taking was done.
Basing social policy on what your ancestors did is a fool’s game.
The Attawapiskat treaty was signed in 1930. The band ended up with a little more than 100 square miles in reserve, and $4 per person per annum in perpetuity. Now there is a diamond mine on their traditional territory that they signed over in that treaty.
My family was up this way long before that. My father and my uncle (with whom I was chatting on the phone yesterday) were born prior to that. If your family is a relative newcomer, then they should not complain about being bound by pre-existing treaties.
I don’t think it is that black and white. The rule of law is based on what ancestors did. The degree of continuity, stability and predictability that law requires so as to function is based on what ancestors did.
Take, for example, ownership of land. You bought your house from someone, who bought it from someone, who bought it from someone, and so on, until we go back to the day that someone bought it or was granted it from the Crown, which in turn had or should have obtained it from a First Nation. (For more on the root of title originating in aboriginal title, have a look at the The Royal Proclamation, October 7, 1763; Calder et al. v. Attorney-General of British Columbia, 1973 CanLII 4 (SCC), [1973] SCR 313; and Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 1997 CanLII 302 (SCC), [1997] 3 SCR 1010.) Your clear title to your property is rooted in what ancestors did. The law that you rely upon in disputes over title to your property is rooted laws ancestors developed, and property transfers they conducted. Government policy needs to take into account not just the future, but also what ancestors did, so as to provide a reasonably continuous, stable and predictible legal and social structure.
I wasn’t “complaining.” The law is the law, and should be changed only by legal means. But basing social policy on “your ancestors did this and that to my ancestors” is stupid, and it’s hurting people, most especially aboriginals, and I give you, as my cite, Attawapiskat. If the law must be changed to reverse stupidity, then so be it.
If you really want to spend all day wanking over whose ancestors did that to them, you end up like Yugoslavia, which tore itself apart over shit that dated back to before the birth of Christopher Columbus (not an exaggeration; Serbs still hold a grudge over the 1389 Battle of Kosovo.) If we all want our descendants 500 years from now ending up like Yugoslavia in 1992, keep separating people based on ancestry. That’ll work great.
But that’s simply nonsense. You’re taking “ancestors” to mean something that clearly wasn’t meant. I’ve never in my life owned land that belonged to MY ancestors. I purchased land from people unrelated (in any meaningful sense) to me.
Having a continually operating system of law is not the same thing as basing decisions on people’s ancestry. YOUR ancestry, yours personally, should not be at all relevant to how you are treated under the law except in terms of your right to be supported by your parents until you’re 18. What country your great grandfather hailed from, be it England or Jamaica or Laos, is of no relevance in a decent and civilized nation.
Root of title goes back to aboriginal title. Aboriginal title is communal (read the law that I cited above). That means that a present-day Indian band’s interest in the land based on their ancestors is every bit as valid as anyone’s title inherited through one’s family.
What I like about Cretien’s White Paper (which was shot down), and what I like about the recent Tsawwassen agreement, is that both try to address the issues of cultural inegrity, social justice, property rights, and economic development, while at the same time extracating the federal government from the present baby-sitting role that it holds. My concern is that this solution will not work for bands that have no resource base, and that regardless of whatever deal is cut today, those same impoverished bands will come back in later generations wanting to re-open the deal, just as today they want to re-open the deal from a couple of generations back. I see no hope for remote bands that do not have an economic base or resources that could be developed. Shovelling money into these bands will not deal with the underlying issue of such communities not being sustainable. To me, that appears to be a cold, hard fact that many remote, impoverished bands are not willing to face, and instead they perpetuate an attitude of dependency rather than self-reliance.
Last fall, I was chatting with a fellow (a status Indian) who figured that people already in Canada should be financially supported by more recent immigrants to Canada. Following this principle, he figured that the solution was not to cut back on Indians being supported by non-Indians, but rather to mitigate the cost of such support by taxing people who are currently immigrating to Canada or who have immigrated to Canada in the last few years. The issue of self-reliance was not of any importance for him. It’s that sort of mindset that worries me.
I really don’t see a problem to be solved. If these people need work then they have 2 choices: move to a location where jobs are readily available or create a product/service that generates income.
I don’t understand this. Why is the government paying them to live there. Actually, why is the government paying them at all? Are they in some sense lesser or incapable of working? If not, then why aren’t they given relocation assistance and moved to one of Canada’s larger cities?
Not hammering Canada here, the US has much the same kind of problems and does much the same kind of thing about them, just hand them some money and hope the problem gets better.
Testy
You’re asking a question that would quite literally take a second year history course to fully explain, but the upshot is this:
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Because relations between the federal government and Indian bands are dictated by treaties that established reservations with the force of constitutional law. You can no more simply get rid of reservations that the United States could, say, simply get rid of the Senate.
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Having established that, you can’t simply let people starve to death. Furthermore,
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The notion of getting aboriginals to integrate into Canadian society is, politically, a horrible time bomb and a PR nightmare. Efforts to do this in the past were racist, ham-handed and led to horrible cases of abuse. So any suggestion today that aboriginals join the rest of us is regarded with a degree of suspicion by everyone. The idea that aboriginals are better off following some sort of “traditional” lifestyle, far away from white people, and only trotted out like trick-performing pets at occasions like Olympic opening ceremonies and royal visits, is a very appealing one in Canada. It means you don’t have to deal with the reality of it very often, and you sound like you’re not a racist because you’re parroting the modern Canadian version of the noble savage baloney.
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The people who specifically are in charge of the system today - the federal department that handles these things, plus the native band leaders - make a lot of money by keeping aboriginals on reserve and in poverty, and so have personal vested interests in keeping things the way they are.
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Legally fixing the problem would require Constitutional amendment. You don’t need a full rundown of Canadian constitutional history, but suffice to say that any attempt to seriously reopen our Constitution would be a political nightmare of the first order. It would be regarded with all the happy anticipation of having your testicles crushed in a vise while a nearsighted dentist does a root canal on your eyeball.
In other words, as bad as the situation is, we are legally and politically stuck, and the people who’re in a position to lead us out of it are making comfortable livings keeping it the way it is.
Just to reinforce RickJay’s point, Testy, I’ll refer you to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (part of out constitution); specifically, section 25:
As an aside…
“All the happy anticipation of having your testicles crushed in a vise while a nearsighted dentist does a root canal on your eyeball,” RickJay? Maybe only if the constitutional amendment process goes smoothly. Otherwise, it’s really going to hurt! 
Declare everyone to be an aboriginal and the entire country a reserve.
I’m not entirely sure why if they show no inclination to change their ways.
This is probably the main reason. Same reason there is no real tax reform to make things simpler.
There’s a bunch of people asking questions about why the Canadian government pays this money, or why we don’t just ignore the treaty.
So here’s the treaty. Attawapiskat was part of the Winisk signing of Treaty 9. The treaty was written in 1905 but signed by Attawapiskat in 1930. Here’s a link (pdf) to the text of the treaty: http://iportal.usask.ca/docs/ICC/treaties/9_eng.pdf
I’m reading it now. Some highlights from the first few pages that might help you understand what was being negotiated:
The treaty covers the cession of 90,000 square miles of territory north of the Albany and Moose rivers in Ontario. That’s 22% of the total land area of Ontario.
Looks like Moonias had the same reservations that some people in this thread have; namely what the purpose of the handout was. I’d ask instead what the phrasing ‘faith and allegiance to the King’ is supposed to mean – and the obligations on both sides of that coin – especially when we’ve already agreed to keeping them on reserves.
What, exactly, would that accomplish? The word ‘reserve’ is meaningless except as part of a treaty obligation. (Read: land sale agreement.)
Well, hey, why not move us all to Mars and give me a pony, too?
The poster asked in a polite fashion why this was a hard problem to solve and Igave an honest answer. It wasn’t necessary for you to shit all over an honest answer.
That’s actually the size of the treaty in 1906. When the Attawapiskat and others were added in 1930, they added an additional 128320 square miles, for a total of about 220,000 square miles or about 60% of Ontario. (See this map.)
Other interesting things to note from the treaty itself, which starts on page 19 of the link in my earlier post:
Tao’s Revenge said they are “limited from hunting”. Here is the relevant clause:
I don’t know if any regulations have been made to prohibit hunting but seeing how many Ontario hunters I know, I doubt it. It’s my understanding that status Indians are actually exempt from (most of?) the regulations but given the amount of misinformation floating around this thread I probably shouldn’t claim that.
$4 worth of 1930-era silver quarters contained about 2.4 oz of silver, today worth about $67. And we’re legally obligated to pay it to the “head of the family”. Which is for all intents and purposes the head of the band. It should also be noted that other similar treaties like Treaty 3 (which borders Treaty 9) contained provisions for supplies of tools, implements, ammunition and livestock; actually, the author of the attached diary mentions that this came up during some of the negotiations.
Also, from page 13, a passage illuminating government policy on Indian land title:
The treaties are the descendant of the British policy of recognizing the land title of the native population. In Quebec, it was done differently; the ‘conquest rules all’ policy espoused by many people in this thread. (Now if you actually want to debate that the Quebec method is superior, all I should have to say in response is Oka.)
What isn’t clear to me is the origin of the treaty. It seems to me, reading between the lines, that the treaty was written solely by white Canadians, in Ottawa with input from Toronto, and then sold to the natives, without negotiation or amendment, at a time when at least some of the tribes were suffering through a time of starvation.
So why are the natives getting so much more then that now? Just as an attempt to help them out or is the 90 million (which works out to something like 9,000 a head annually) part of some other stipulation of the treaty?
Take a chill pill. I wasn’t doing anything like that. If you think so that is your interpretation of what I wrote (based upon I don’t know what), not my intention as I thought your answer was a very good one. A little sensitive, don’t you think?
My solution is simple. Declare everyone an aboriginal and then the question of treaties becomes moot. Everyone is the same and has the same rights under the constitution thus negating stupid clauses giving rights to some and not others. Then we can address issues of unsupportable communities as separate from constitutional issues and actually have a chance of solving them. Because I can guarantee that any clauses in the constitution that give someone something can never be taken away from them. The only way to make change is to bring everyone else up to that same level.