It’s not my argument, but I’ve been reading on the comments for a lot of major news sites that if Aboriginals get their own law, then what happens when a Muslim man kills his daughter for dishonouring her family? Should he be tried under Sharia law which is more in his favour?
Oh yeah. Because I’m sure he’s not suffering at all. His daughters are dead, and it’s all his fault. But I bet he just laughs that off and thinks to himself “I sure hope they don’t put me in jail”. :rolleyes:
There are options beyond jailing them and doing nothing, such as sentencing circles, for one example. Family counselling can help a lot too.
We know that the biggest risk factor for becoming an abuser or a victim of domestic violence in adulthood is witnessing it as a child. We also know that domestic violence is very common on reserves, so there are a lot of these child witnesses. Counselling programs for child witnesses are very effective. That’s another opportunity.
I have not seen evidence that incarceration really helps domestic violence either. The Canadian system doesn’t have the capacity to provide anything close to adequate counselling or rehabilitation for inmates. Many women are injured or killed by their abuser before or after he is in prison.
Canada actually has a pretty good approach towards aboriginal family violence. In my opinion it’s main problem is that it doesn’t reach nearly far enough or get anything like enough funding (and that it doesn’t have nearly enough effective participation of natives in its development and implementation). I think the rest of us can learn a lot from it.
There are plenty more things to consider alongside incarceration.
As per Muffin, above:
There is no reason to expect that Sharia law would be any different. Non-judicial tribunals like this are not unheard of in Canadian law.
What you would end up on many reserves is most of the women, and almost all of the men, being incarcerated.
The spousal violence works both ways, with aboriginal women taking the worst of it by far, but both genders dishing out far, far more domestic violence than in the general Canadian population. Have a look at the stats in post #19, and for a fuller explanation, post #25 in a related thread.
The question then becomes, how can you reduce spousal violence in aboriginal communities without further disrupting the communities by continuously incarcerating a very high percentage of the members of those communities.
Whether living on or off reserve in Canada, a status Indian who is registered with a reserve will be eligible for medical and dental benefits, be eligible for tuition subsidization, and be exempt from paying sales tax.
A status Indian living on a reserve and earning money either on a reserve or in circumstances closely tied to a reserve is exempt from paying income tax on that income, and garnishment of such income is prohibited except when the creditor is another status Indian or Indian band.
A status Indian living on reserve but working off reserve in circumstances that are not closely tied to a reserve will have to pay income tax.
A status Indian living off reserve will have to pay income tax.
Real and personal property owned by a status Indian and situated on a reserve can not be seized in execution of a civil judgment, except when the creditor is another status Indian or Indian band.
Why did you put the bit about effective participation by natives in parenthesis? Wouldn’t that be the single determining factor in its success, far beyond funding or reach?
I don’t think so. There are fantastic programs with great native participation but they don’t get funding, so they don’t go far. Both are necessary, but I think if the funding and institutional support was there and effective, then the native participation that currently exists would improve significantly.
For example, people living in remote communities have high travel costs, so their participation depends on financial support. A simple meeting or training session (let alone a conference with dozens of attendees) costs many times more when attendees are from outside of Canada’s major cities (and that’s where most natives live). Pick any community from this list of Aboriginal reserves in Canada and figure out how much it would cost (in time and money) to travel from there to the nearest major city. That should give you an idea of the kind of barriers some of these folks face to participation.
More funding would remove obstacles to participation and allow natives to develop the capacity to support the system. I haven’t seen the causation work the other way around - greater participation of natives does not bring more funding.
Can I just point out that many of the “special privileges” exist not because of “guilt,” but because of treaties signed with those nations? As with any other treaty, we are not in a position simply to abandon them should they become inconvenient; they must be renegotiated (as, in fact, is being done in some cases).
The legal origins of the current situation don’t change the point that was made, which is that the system doesn’t work. 141+ years of our government’s solutions have resulted in 141 consecutive years of failure. We’ve marginalized over half a million people, quite a lot of them in a system of workless gulags, and created an underclass racked with unemployment, substance abuse, poverty and misery. This is costing people their LIVES. Frankly, if breaking a treaty would solve that and prevent the needless waste of human beings, only a monster or a fool wouldn’t break it.
But of course, if I had the answer to all this, by now I’d have won the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
Whether this has been caused by the treaties or by the failure to respect the treaties is up for discussion. (Also, even if you think the treaties are bad, breaking the treaties ‘for their own good’ without the nations’ say-so strikes me as even more and greater paternalism, but there you go.)
However, what I was arguing with was merely the notion, a rather widespread one, that “special privileges” came about at some indefinite point as some sort of expiatory largesse to make up for “guilt,” rather than fulfilment of the obligations into which the Crown entered with the nations in question.
We knew that my sister-in-law’s mother came from a poorer background than ours, that the only book in her house is the phone book, that she never talks about the village she was born in (SiL recently needed to fill in some paperwork for which she needed her mother’s birthplace and had to ask her; I know the exact addresses my parents were born at).
A few weeks back, she mentioned happily that back when she was a child, doing the cleanup after a meal was much easier: they had to clean the one pot and the one spoon. We (including her own daughter) discovered that her family was what we call “cucharada y paso atrás”, “eat a spoonful, leave the spoon in the pot and step back.” At some point her parents moved from their one-room shack in the mountains to a one-room shack in a town nearby; after two years they moved to another one-room shack where, for the first time, the daughters were able to get a bed (until then, the parents, any babies and the only son slept in the same bed, the daughters on the floor). The first time she held a fork in her hands was when she got hired as a servant at age 12.
Compared with the difficulties some people in reservations can face in order to leave and move on sounds like comparing my own childhood to hers. Does this justify this man’s actions? No. But “just move” isn’t always an available solution, either physically or mentally. One of the things that struck me about the description of the boarding schools is that basically after being taught skills that might be useful in a town, those kids got taken back to “the ass-end of nowhere.” What would any of us be able to do for himself if at age, say, 14, we’d been taken from the place where we’d grown up and moved thousands of miles away to live among strangers, in a strange society?
High School is grade 8-12 most places up here - although I guess that might seem like an ironic comment in Chicago.
…and thanks for your contributions to this thread, Muffin – Globe & Mail quality reading for the morning.
As far as I can tell, the treaties only dealt wth land and resource allocation. Indian Acts by the British and subsequently the federal government from 1850 on, ostensibly to protect Indian land and resources and further on assimulation, were not negotiated.
For example the taxation exemptions, a biggie, were granted, not negotiated.
Further, I was being facetious in my comment, since we’re in the Pit, but with an eye towards what I see as the greater part of the sickness in Canadian society. We feel a real and probably quite legitimate guilt over the current plight of First Nations people here, and because of it we haven’t provided ground-shaking, difficult but ultimately better for all solutions to the issues. There is a real fear of making changes that will piss off anyone on either side (that’s the Canadian way, of course, don’t piss anyone off!) so baby steps are taken with everything.
As for negotiating, yes those treaties that apply were negotiated but this is a sovereign nation. If the government wanted to take the land back and build a new and better deal for Aboriginals, what’s to really stop them? I’m not sure they should go that route, but I just think more needs to be done to shake things up.
Oh please. Muffin writes much better than that! 
Please be careful with quotation marks; that makes it appears as if I wrote the government should do something ‘for their own good’, using those words, which I did not.
Of course your technical point is correct in that the current situation is to the larger extent defined by a very long list of treaties, not merely one peice of unilateral federal legislation. The legalities involved are dizzying in their complexity.
That’s the sort of funny thing about the whole Native situation in Canada - I would say that the vast majority of Canadians would really, truly like it if things were improved for all Natives. We don’t have the faintest clue how to go about doing it, though, and there is sort of an underlying attitude that even to acknowledge what is going on on Reserves and with Natives in general is racist. Yeah, Natives drink and drug a lot. Yeah, there is a lot of abuse in Native communities. Yeah, Natives don’t work much. You just can’t say that, though. We’re not getting very far in fixing things if we can’t even talk about them.
Exactly so. I just wish someone could figure it out.
Another issue that I don’t believe was touched on in this thread: the deliberate attempt by the government of Canada to forcibly assimilate First Nations people. Or worse. From the wretched and unbelievably callous relocation of “bush Indians” to the high Arctic to the “out adoption” of native children, our government has done enormous harm. As if the residential school system wasn’t bad enough.
I apologize, that was not my intent. We need a convenient convention for the equivalent of scare-quotes that does not imply that the contents are actually quoted matter. I was trying to do that by using single quotes (had I meant to actually quote you, I would have used double quotes).
The father, who was released on bail conditions while awaiting sentencing for getting drunk and letting his children freeze to death, is back in jail on a new charge for breaching one of his bail conditions – you can guess which one: consuming alcohol. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2009/01/14/pauchay-arrested.html