It references an old Roman punishment for recalcitrant legions. One man in ten would be selected by lot, and killed. So, a true decimation would only reduce a population by 10%.
The problem is that while the roots of the word, and the origin are both clear to that meaning, the common use of the word is as you’ve said it. And many dictionaries reflect the common usage.
The sell-outs. 
Sell-outs indeed! 
I knew the one-in-ten thing I’ve just seen the common term as I used it defined that way as well. Still, good to know.
To answer Cat Fight’s question, yes Aboriginal who register an address off-reserve do lose certain benefits. I’m no expert on them but one is tax-exemption. I also know that health care in Canada is a provincial concern, but reservations are taken care of by the federal government, and once you move off-reserve you need to be registered with the provincial government to receive health care. There are certain other benefits I’m sure.
Just for the record, Yellow Quill isn’t a remote location by any reasonable Saskatchewan standard. It’s southeast of Melfort a bit. There aren’t any large centres right next to it, but it’s smack in the middle of the populated part of rural Saskatchewan.
Actually, it goes by a lot quicker if you commit a whole bunch of crimes at once. More efficient use of the legal system that way.
I guess I say - so what? You’re just talking about trade-offs. Yes, you would have to give up certain things, like moving away from home and friends, facing social pressure, and standing up to bullies. But again, if you are otherwise going to condemn your children to a life of violence, alcoholism and possible death, so what? Nothing would be more important to me than the welfare of my children.
I made some poor decisions, and got pregnant when I was 19, living at home and basically jobless. I sacrificed a lot for a lot of years in order to provide a decent home and lots of love for my daughter. That’s what trade-offs mean. Everyone makes trade-offs every day.
I cannot think of a worse punishment than losing a child through your own negligence, so I don’t know the value of a lifetime sentence on the father. Plus, the circumstances of these deaths indicate to me that he didn’t give much of a shit in the first place. The real value of a lifetime jail term, particularly one rendered by a sentencing circle, would be to put the community on notice that this kind of horror will not be tolerated. This one case will probably not make much of a difference, but every little bit counts.
It may also help to foster a new way of thinking - Blame on the white man (or the government or whoever) may be warranted, but it rarely promotes success.
As others have noted, “kill every tenth person”.
As someone or other put it, the very existence of this word says a lot about the Romans as a civilization - how many civilizations even HAVE a word for “kill every tenth person”? 
I was speaking more in a general sense regarding Aboriginal persons, but this is valid for this individual I guess.
As to Sateryn76’s points, I think the “so what?” misses the point. It’s just not the same for people in some situations. Do you ever wonder why the same people commit crimes over and over and why the same people make bad decisions over and over? It’s because they don’t know any better. Either that or they simply lack the ability to personally overcome their demons. I’ve lived in shitty neighbourhoods and seen generational welfare families, people who literally knew nothing but welfare and, well, quite frankly white-trash lifestyles. Try talking to those people. They just simply don’t have any incentive, motivation, ability or knowledge of how to change things. Many Aboriginal people are in the same boat.
I will reiterate that this does not excuse the guy in the OP. He deserves to pay a price for his crimes. I think the mother does too, to some degree. But it’s not so simple overall, if you see the bigger picture.
I live here (in Canada) and I’m fuly aware of all the issues in Muffin’s post (did work for an organization dealing with substance abuse --huffing specifically-- in Canadian aboriginal communities.) I actually support the concept of the sentencing circle because they are actually aiming to rehabilitate rather than punish.
A sentencing circle because it does not mean he’ll get off lightly, but it does mean that there will likely be a sentence customized to his needs, so that he’ll still have an opportunity to live a productive and healthier life. But he has 16 convictions for failing to comply with court orders which suggests he’s not actually all that into rehabilitation. Sentencing circles are usually reserved for criminals who are not expected to spend more than 18-24 months in jail, so I will admit that it concerns me due to the fact that the issue is a capital crime.
However, if the sentence is too light, a judge may still intervene. So I don’t raelly have an issue with having a sentencing circle provide recommendations in this case.
What I do have issues with, are statements like this:
It’s smacks too much of apologists who say “He only hits me when he’s drunk, but he’s really a great guy.”
I’m not saying the guy should be lynched, but that people should damn well be held responsible for their actions while intoxicated. Rape a woman? Sorry, “I was drunk” is a bullshit answer. Get behind the wheel of a car and run down a family? “I was drunk.” is no excuse.
And I would also like to see the kids’ mother called on the carpet for leaving her children in the care of a guy who was blind drunk arguing with her so badly that she felt she had to leave the house.
I have seen handout after handout wasted. I’ve seen people given free education off-reserve, I’ve seen scholarship books full of opportunities for Aboriginals, I’ve seen teachers wanting to do their best to help.
Throwing money at the problem isn’t going to fix it, but social programs aren’t helping either. What can we do? The Canadian government can’t stop the corruption inside the reserves because if they go near it they are accused of sticking their nose into Aboriginal business. But say the word money and people come out of the woodwork.
I’m a 22 year old Saskatchewan farmgirl. My dad is an alcoholic who was beaten by his father, and his father’s father was probably an alcoholic who beat his son too. Dad never even had the chance to finish school because he had to go to work on the farm. The residential school scandal was a horrible thing, but how long do I have to pay for those bad choices? I don’t give my father a pass, but he worked hard to get a better quality of life, but I’m supposed to feel bad for people who won’t even try? I’m not talking about Elders who suffered first-hand, I’m talking about their grandchildren, my peers, who went to the same schools I did.
Kudos to your father, really. It take a very strong man to overcome that kind of history and he deserves credit for it. But don’t think for a second that most people in the same boat wouldn’t change if they could do so. Many really just can’t. That’s the problem.
What’s the answer? That’s the million (maybe billion) dollar question, isn’t it? I don’t really know, other than separate but equal is not a good solution for Aboriginal persons. Personally, I’m a bit harsh on this one in that I think reservations should be bulldozed and Aboriginal persons given a timeline for integration (with federal and provincial support) into wider Canadian society. Having them living on the fringe doesn’t work, and having special privilege out of guilt doesn’t work, so eventually we’re going to have to bring them into our world, so to speak, and preservation of the culture and history can be done the same as any other group of immigrants who moved here and built a community centre or what have you. But that’s just one idea.
I have spent 5 years living near several semi remote reserves in north western Ontario and northern Manitoba. I resided on a reserve on the east coast of Vancouver Island for 5 years and my shop of 6 years to the present is adjacent to a reserve on Vancouver Island.
The plight of reserves between the east coast of Vancouver Island and northern Canada is as different as night and day.
Lets face it. When the white man lives in these isolated regions his drinking increases as well. that’s the northern way of life. But for most of the white people, when the mines close they move on. The other whites set up businesses and use their connections to facilitate the recreational industry of hunting and fishing. They always have a self reliant future.
The natives have nowhere else to go, and many have nothing to do. There are no resources that they can capitalize on if they want to go beyond subsistence.Few jobs available. They’ve abandoned their previous way of life and now totally dependant on the government for sustenance.
And many use that sustenance to escape.
The other aspect that has never been studied as far as I know, but I strongly suspect is that these falling down drunk Indians really don’t drink anymore than your walking drunk white man. I’ve sat in bars with northern Indians till closing and have often seen a glass of beer just sit on the table for long periods, drinking less often than me. But their lower jaw goes slack and when its time to go they can be difficult to move.
The trajedy is that there is no solution that is politically acceptable at the moment. My experience is from 30 years ago. Obviously nothing has changed. The chiefs who try to make their communities dry are losing the battle.
We need a program to give confidence to the young and encourage them to get off the isolated reserves. Support them off the reserve as well and allocate a portion of civil service jobs available to start them on a path of self reliance.
There’s no future in the north for a sustained population without an enduring mine.The sooner we understand that the sooner we’ll be able to address the problem.
There have been numerous studies of groups of people who came to alcohol “late” and being unable to process it the same way as groups of people who have been drinking for thousands of years.
That excludes alcoholics, of course, who are found in most groups and definitely process alcohol differently than other people.
I fully support this idea. I think most Canadians will agree at this point that the whole reservation-and-eternal-welfare system is badly broken. Yeah, what happened 200 years ago was bad (although it really was just business as usual when one group of humans met a different group), but I think it’s time to let it go. I don’t have any guilt over what my ancestors did or didn’t do in settling Canada; it really should become moot and we should all move on.
I mean no disrespect to those of you who overcame your ugly childhoods to become productive citizens, but you simply cannot compare your situation with that of on-reserve natives unless you were one.
To the extent that you had these things, your experience was more privileged than kids on reserves:
It’s quite easy for us to sit here and say these kids should just move to the city and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But this is simply not a realistic option for most of them. For one thing, it’s expensive to travel to reserves and back (because they’re not generally found on main transport routes - there are reserves in Ontario that require a minimum of $1000 and several days just to get to from the closest cities), so leaving home means leaving for extended periods of time. Lots of people who have grown up with all the advantages in the world are not able to do this.
Plus, the family and community on the reserve are the only ones they know. How easy would it be for you to pick up and start again among total strangers, in another city (not to mention another culture), knowing that you might not see your family and community again for many years? Perhaps you could do it, but it would not be easy, particularly if you didn’t have the life skills and emotional strength that many on-reserve natives lack.
We accept that there are things all kids need in order to thrive:
Many kids on many native reserves are missing some or all of these things. It’s one thing to have a traumatic childhood and a dysfunctional immediate family. It’s quite another thing to not have any examples of thriving childhoods and strong immediate families as part of your community.
I’m not for one moment saying that makes it okay for them to get drunk and kill their children. I’m suggesting that perhaps our ideas of guilt and innocence and retribution and rehabilitation* are not appropriate to their circumstances, and maybe we should find a different way to approach it that would be more effective than harsh retributive judgments.
Consider: if our response to violence against women in native communities was to indiscriminately jail the abusers (equivalent to the zero-tolerance approach adopted in many non-native communities), there would not be very many men left in the communities at all. You’d get a lot of women working a lot harder to pick up the slack, and a lot of young men with nobody to look up to at all. Exactly what would that accomplish?
Um, fewer women being beaten? Fewer children learning to abuse women at their father’s (and mother’s) knee? More men being held accountable for their criminal actions?
Any of these would be a good start.
You really think widespread incarceration will have more positive effects on a community than negative?
I’ve never seen it work this way - do you have some examples?
At least two, Rome and English-speaking Western civilization; and English-speakers stole our word so i guess that says even more about us!
True enough; but obviously we English speakers tend to mangle the meaning pretty badly. Even, as it were, to decimate it.
As someone one remarked, English is the language that follows other languages down dark alleys, mugs them, and then rifles through their pockets for loose vocabulary. 
I suppose you have a good point - much of what goes on in the inner city community is blamed on the high percentage of adult males in prison. I don’t know if this is true, but it seems logical at least.
So, if bootstraps are no good, and jailing is no good, and no examples are available for the young, and they are too far out to travel anywhere, etc., etc…
How do we fix this? Or is the correct answer “we” don’t do anything (or at least not very much) - “they” do it themselves?
I think it’s about time “we” leave a lot of this to “them”.
IMHO - All wife-beaters and child-killers still belong in jail…
I have no idea- I just know that NOT incarcerating criminals sends the message that criminal behavior is acceptable and reasonable. Oh, I’m sorry, it’s not really your fault that you beat your wife- you’re native- go right ahead, don’t let us stop you.
You are teaching the next generation, that’s all. As long as you’re okay with that, then fine.