IF LOCATION were all that mattered, the Rapid Lake First Nation reserve in Quebec would be a paradise. It sits in a wildlife area popular with hikers. The highway leading to it weaves through forests and lakes. But idyllic is not the word that comes to mind driving into the Algonquin community of about 350 people on a rainy day. The dirt roads are turning to mud. Some homes appear derelict. The only electricity comes from a diesel generator. At an office in a trailer Tony Wawatie, a community official, doesn’t mince words: “Some of our people live in third-world conditions.”
Rapid Lake is far from the worst First Nation reserve in Canada. Water does not have to be boiled before drinking, as in more than 130 other First Nation communities. It has not been devastated by youth suicide, like Wapekeka in northern Ontario where three 12-year-old girls have killed themselves this year. Health care beyond what the on-reserve clinic can provide is a drive, not a flight, away. Still, this community where almost all adults are on social assistance is jarring in a rich democracy.As Canada prepares to celebrate its 150th birthday on July 1st, its main unfinished business is the situation of the 1.4m indigenous people: Inuit, First Nation and mixed-race Métis. “No relationship is more important to our government and to Canada than the one with indigenous peoples,” the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, insisted on June 21st, National Aboriginal Day. (He is pictured with Perry Bellegarde, the head of the Assembly of First Nations.) But he will have his work cut out to convince them that he means it, after a series of broken promises reaching back to before Canada was even a nation. Few will join the birthday bash. Why would they? asks Pam Palmater, a Mi’kmaw lawyer and university professor. “It’s a celebration of the worst 150 years of indigenous peoples’ lives.”
Canada was not terra nullius, or nobody’s land, as the fiction of the time had it, when Europeans came to live there in the 17th century. An estimated 500,000 inhabitants could trace their roots back at least 10,000 years. The Iroquois Confederacy, which united warring tribes, predated the Dominion of Canada by more than 250 years. The French and British signed peace treaties with the locals, who outnumbered them, and enlisted them in battles with each other and with the United States. “Canada would be American today if not for the Indian allies who fought for the Crown,” says Peter Russell, a historian.
Once the European population grew, the balance of power shifted. The British ignored land rights and treaties guaranteed by King George in 1763. Indigenous peoples were confined to reserves and their lands taken by the Crown or sold. The reserve at Rapid Lake measures less than a square kilometre, though its Algonquin residents claim a territory 10,000 times that. After the birth of Canada, efforts to assimilate or wipe out indigenous peoples were redoubled. Between the 1870s and 1996 over 150,000 indigenous children were put in residential schools to “kill the Indian in the child”.
Only when indigenous Canadians began using the courts to defend their legal rights did their situation finally start to improve. In 2008 Stephen Harper, then the prime minister, apologised for the residential schools and set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2015 it said that the schools were part of an organised effort to wipe out aboriginal culture. It has paid more than C$3bn ($2.4bn) to settle abuse claims, and C$1.6bn to former residents still living in 2005. Last year Mr Trudeau started an inquiry into the estimated 1,017 indigenous women and girls who were murdered and the 164 who have gone missing since 1980. He recently handed the former American embassy building, which faces parliament, to indigenous groups and removed from his own office the name of Hector-Louis Langevin, an architect of the residential school system.
No comments:
Post a Comment