I am interested in what you hear and learn. We don’t yet have truth and reconciliation down here in the States. We might be able to listen and learn from you!

Not Canadian, but I am sporting my orange t-shirt today.

---

--------------------------
The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

I don’t know enough about the original people in the city I live in now. New Westminster was one of the early important cities in the colony and my understanding is that First Nations were forced out pretty much right away. The city has taken down a statue of a prominent early judge and is looking to change the city’s tag line from “The Royal City” as part of reconciliation, prompting the usual outrage against woke politicians.

I would seek out Indigenous authors and creators. I prefer fiction, so that’s what I can recommend.

I think the only US First Nations authors I’ve read are Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ (very good) and Angeline Boulley’s ‘Firekeeper’s Daughter’ (young adult fiction, has a bit of a first novel awkwardness to it).

If you want to know more about residential school’s Richard Wagamese’s ‘Indian Horse’, or the movie made from it are excellent. It’s fiction but rooted in real experiences. NOT appropriate viewing for kids. After watching or reading then realize the last of these schools in Canada closed down in the 1990s. I don’t how widespread schools like that were in the US, but they did exist.

Here is what I read today (from an obituary) about the impact of residential schools on Northern Cheyenne people who live near my hometown:

“Looking back on his early days at boarding school, he identified how the traditional Cheyenne familial system was damaged through this forced assimilation, largely removing our ability for healthy love and affection.”

Love and affection.

A while back the thread on the residential schools in Canada. Windy asked if the death rate there was worse than anywhere else. Putting aside that idiocy, how many white boarding schools even have a graveyard?

It's crazy making that happened so recently in our past.

---

===============
Proud member of the MSF (Maple Syrup Mafia)

Citation

I reviewed the thread. You're full of bullshit. Carry on.

Here is a quote for you asshole:


"I would posit no it wasn't a dumping ground for the worst of the worst.

Set aside the cultural issues for a moment.

750 bodies sounds like a lot. But if the school is 100 years old that's 7.5 deaths per year. If the majority of the bodies are pre-1950 (dawn of penicillin) then it changes the evaluation.

Before going down the condemnation path you'd have to examine the death rate at the schools versus the tribal death rate and adjust for the age of the bodies.

If the death rate at the school was 10% in 1890 but tribal death rate was 20% for the same cohort of kids due to disease etc than the school was a net positive. If inverse then a negative. You also have to take into account who went to the school was it a population distribution or were the strongest or weakest physically kids sent there"



Again I will ask... how many white boarding schools do you know with graveyards you putz?

---

===============
Proud member of the MSF (Maple Syrup Mafia)

An awful, deceitful attempt to justify kidnapping and child abuse. All the more staggering from someone who claims to hate child abusers. The attempt to deny its existence speaks volumes.

---

"I keep hoping for you to use your superior intellect to be less insufferable. Sadly, you continue to disappoint." - gofigure

I realize it's the end of the month and the quarter so you need to get your irrational outrage numbers up so you're not belittled at the next meeting

A) I appreciate the quote without a link or context
B) What I said in reality is not what you purported I said
C) Boys Town and Eton College off the top of my head

Hey you posted something similar in the original thread. Lack of creative thinking demonstrates a lack of intelligence.

See my previous reply to you

Went to work as per usual. Not particularly interested in our national day of self flagellation. It is like the constant bitching about healthcare and then nothing changes. I have patients who are native. In fact the wife of the chief of the local Delewares. I go out of my way to make sure they get good care.

If native people are going to prosper we need to get on with inking deals to develop natural resources and share the outcomes. The biggest obstacle lately to this happening seems to be unreasonable loyalty to climate and environmental agendas. There are well documented incidences where native bands either signed deals or where ready to sign and they didn't happen because the environmentalists didn't want them (Fairy creek is one example) or the gov't wanted every last native group to agree before proceeding. An example of that would be the pipeline blockade which resulted from the federal gov't acknowledging the hereditary leadership of the Wetʼsuwetʼen nation rather than the elected leadership. So no natural gas pipeline the coast when dozens of other native bands were ready to sign and share the revenue.

Raising the standard of living for natives is going to take lots of money. If we want native fisherman to prosper on the Atlantic coast for instance we will have to buy out lobster licenses so natives can enter the fishery. Being a low productivity country works against that.

---

They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

I haven’t seen any self-flagellation. I’m curious what that looks like. Seriously, I haven’t seen any self-flagellation in Montana and California, the places I’ve lived most of my life. Canada might be different? What actions or words are involved?

With regard to economic development, I’m fortunate to have lived near tribes who take vastly different approaches. As I consider economic development, I don’t think the paths the tribes took really addresses the core of Truth and Reconciliation (my understanding of what that is). The paths they took were their in response to attempts to annihilate and assimilate them.

It’s fine and dandy to look to the future and talk about future economic development that you think should happen for indigenous people, but it kind of ignores and mirrors the colonial mindset, that thing we’re supposed to be honest about and reconcile ourselves to. Maybe it’s good to take a moment.

It looks like where we all get together and tell each other what bad people we are because people a hundred years ago did bad things to native people. Massive numbers of the people in this country came from somewhere else in the last 50 years anyway. When we have these facile "we acknowledge we are meeting on native land acknowledgements" yet nobody in the room would give up their land for natives.

We need to stop telling lies and move forward. Who on this board would be willing to live in a communal land system with no private land property? Who would be willing to live under hereditary leaders? Yet these are the systems we are promoting to solve the problems.

In Canada despite buckets of money (6 billion dollars over 7 years) the federal gov't has made very slow progress on solving boil water advisories on native reserves. This is despite constant platitudes about how we need to help. They say there were 105 boil water advisories when they started in 2015 but there were actually 77. They added advisories to the baseline retroactively in 2018 to make the number 105. They also declared victory on 11 boil water advisories by providing a water system for a reserve because they say the reserve was on 11 seperate systems. This is how you fudge gov't numbers. So they actually went from 77 to 58 at a cost of roughly 300 million dollars per reserve. That is totally not sustainable. Yet we maintain the illusion that native people can prosper in these far flung areas. That one can live a hunter gatherer life and have modern healthcare.

https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/environmental-indicators/drinking-water-advisories-public-systems-reserve.html


When somebody comes forward with solutions that work sign me up.


Until then I am focusing my energies elsewhere. Presently I am involved with a group that has brought in refugees from Burma who where persecuted and chased out to Indonesia. Three families in the last six years. I am no Mother Theresa but I kick in 3000-4000 thousand dollars a year. Within a few years these people who a totally visible minorities have jobs and are moving forward. Their kids probably will be going to university.

---

They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

Well said

Who says you’re a bad person for what people did a hundred years ago? I want to know! Strangers say that? Or your friends or co-workers? I’ve never had anyone say that to me. Every time someone is whining to me about me, it’s always related to something they say I said or did. Goddamn whiners.

x2.

---

Long Chile was a silly place.

[The collective] We have been saying a lot of people are now bad for things "they" did hundred+ years ago.

I think I understand. You DON’T feel like you’ve been told YOU are a bad person for things people did a hundred years ago, correct? You’re saying everyone says the OTHER people a hundred+ years ago (and even in the 1990s) were bad for things, like the residential schools. You guys have heard about the residential schools and abuses enough times and now you don’t want to hear it any more? It’s time to stop talking about it?

Spockman says, “we need to stop telling lies and move forward.”

Can anyone explain that? Who is the we? Is that the collective “everyone”? What lies have they said?

Is there a movement to abolish private property rights in Canada? I love public lands and the right to access public lands, and in places like Montana we see a push to get rid of public lands and access to them. Is the opposite happening in Canada?

In the United States, we send A TON of money to our far flung people in Alaska because it’s pretty much impossible for them to survive on their own. Alaska receives the most federal assistance than any other state. Are Canadians generally against sending money to far-flung places?

As an old white guy, I don't feel like I'm being told I'm a bad person. If someone actually believes that because of my race I'm bad, then that person is a racist and an idiot, so screw them. They are just as wrongheaded as any other racist.

Sometimes I wonder if people who feel they are being attacked feel so because they hold some of the beliefs, opinions, whatever that are being criticized, in other words they have a guilty conscious :)

If Truth & Reconciliation means what the words suggest, then Canada still has work to do. There seem to be claims of deceit (lies!) and the sentiments are impatience & not particularly friendly.

Status: no truth & reconciliation yet.