Truth and Reconciliation National Day: Marx-inspired tribalism is a death sentence for Indigenous youth

As we head into National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) on September 30, there’s an honourable sense of wanting to do right by Indigenous peoples. My problem is that TRC has led Canadians to believe the falsehood that the legacy of residential schools is responsible for Indigenous dysfunctionality today. The 1967 Hawthorn Report said that at peak enrolment they comprised just 6 percent of all Indigenous students, with a quarter of those in hostels attending provincial and territorial schools. For all the real horrors, there were also success stories, including many of today’s elite. As just one example, Noah Carpenter was born on the trapline, he graduated from residential school in Inuvik in 1963 and he went on to become a world-renowned thoracic surgeon.

For the marginalized Indigenous, there’s a terrible incidence of homelessness and overcrowding in wretched shacks

For the marginalized Indigenous, there’s a terrible incidence of homelessness and overcrowding in wretched shacks. Unemployment and unemployability obtain for multigenerational welfare dependent families. Normality in education is the young Ojibwa woman from northern Ontario I asked how she came to move to Ottawa. She related that at age 13 she’d been afraid to go to school for fear of getting gang-raped on the way home. Unusually, her mother had a job and could save money to relocate. A mother from Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, told me that when she moved to Ottawa her son was of the age to enter Grade 7. But he tested at Grade 3 level. After smoking, binge-drinking and consuming drugs during pregnancy, undernourished teenage mothers deliver multiple FASD-afflicted babies by the age of 21. Natan Obed, president of the national Inuit association, describes the prevalence of sexual abuse as a scourge. The book ‘Flowers on My Grave’ by Ruth Teichroeb tells of shocking mismanagement by child welfare agencies, both by Indians and outsiders. She relates how ostensible leaders are frequently sexual predators and then family members in positions of authority cover up for them. There are similar heart-rending passages in Mark Milke’s recent book ‘The Victim Cult’. The majority of removals of Indigenous children from their home environment arise from situations considered intolerable in the mainstream society.

Remote Indigenous settlements have the world’s highest male youth suicide rate

Remote Indigenous settlements have the world’s highest male youth suicide rate, with children as young as 10 killing themselves. A former Anglican minister in Iqaluit, NU, and then in Yellowknife, NT, Tim Atherton, was reported in the New York Times as having talked to hundreds of native youth in the early 1990s. ''Young people would tell me,” he said, “ 'We are seeing all this stuff on TV, we watch the hockey games, we read the magazines. Yet it is all out of reach for us,' They graduate from high school and there is nothing to do at the end of it. Life had become so fearful and hopeless that death actually seemed more welcoming.'' Today’s response is psychobabble under the guise of addressing mental health problems.

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There are more Indigenous inmates of Canada’s hell-hole prisons than there were students at peak enrolment in residential schools

Numbering some 16,000, there are more Indigenous inmates of Canada’s hell-hole prisons than there were students at peak enrolment in residential schools. As described in Maclean’s magazine, they fail even to provide for safety. I know a young Ojibwa man who got hold of a baseball bat because of an altercation. He then bludgeoned a fellow inmate to death. He’s now serving a 15-year sentence. This week he told me the prison provides no education or skills training for employment after his eventual release. By contrast, prisons in Holland and Norway treat inmates with respect. The recidivism rate is far less than in Canada, and the cost of running their prisons is lower. For next generations, these questions remain unresolved: Should Indigenous youth carry forward a separate culture, a separate identity and a separate livelihood based on the traditions of the hunter-trapper? Or should Canada enable Indigenous youth to become full-fledged participants in all aspects of the high-tech economy? TRC, like other Indigenous-run inquiries, demand self-determination and ever more money for the elite. It eluded TRC Commissioner Murray Sinclair that educated and skilled people in or preparing for rewarding employment seldom get into trouble or go to jail. And they can expect to provide their own housing. Sinclair never advocates for the intensive education, skills training and opportunity for rewarding employment that he had in his own childhood and youth. So, with all the grandstanding about cultural genocide, and with the fur trade long defunct, which aspects remain relevant for next generations? Yes, the welfare state and the bigotry of low expectations superseded the bounty of Mother Nature. Meantime, the romanticism of a pre-industrial Garden of Eden lives on. However, there’s an irreconcilable conflict between tribal and essentially Marxist, dead-end culture and Karl Popper’s observation in his landmark book ‘The Open Society and its Enemies,’ “Individualism, united with altruism, has become the basis of our western civilization.” Around the world, notably in Asia, there are many templates for enabling Third World societies for the high-tech economy while retaining cultural identity. In one generation. As it did for Noah Carpenter.