By Colin Alexander -- Woke Watch Canada Newsletter——Bio and Archives--July 9, 2023
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Every reasonable and decent Canadian knows there’s been discrimination against Indians and Inuit on the basis of ethnicity. So it’s now generally accepted that remediation is necessary to counter the sins of the past. That’s what the Liberal government’s Action Plan, released on June 20, purports to do. It follows on from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which received royal assent on June 21, 2021. In reality, under the guise of reconciliation, it’s a manifesto for replicating apartheid as it was in South Africa, and it sets out a policy for the perpetual misery and marginalization of a burgeoning underclass.
Reconciliation for Indigenous peoples with the wider community has captured the popular imagination. It wraps up in one bundle the romanticized Indian of Hollywood, the Disneyfied iconography of a pre-industrial Garden of Eden, the Utopian anti-capitalist movement and the pressure of environmentalists to save the world. Include the iconography of the idealized Eskimo (Inuk) of Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North, along with that of Grey Owl, and the vision is irresistible. As an expression of nostalgia for a simpler past and communing with Mother Nature, this vision thing’s been around for centuries in one form or another. Canadian Ernest Thompson Seton collaborated with Robert Baden-Powell to incorporate this iconography into the scouting movement.
Superimposed on this scenario, there’s the ludicrous spectacle of gospel-makers Murray Sinclair playing Hercule Poirot and the special interlocutor for unmarked graves Kimberley Murray playing Miss Marple. They’re using their usurped credibility to deceive receptive and well-meaning Canadians and, especially, to deceive Indigenous children with the falsehoods and exaggerations of their lurid imagination. There are no mass graves, no murder victims and no bodies. There’s nothing unusual about a grave in a cemetery being no longer marked after a wooden cross has disintegrated. Overriding all the evidence, Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Murray have taken it upon themselves to weaponize the cult of victimhood to get money and power for themselves and their fellow oligarchs. Their objective of self-determination—the separate-nation status of UNDRIP—requires severing the hapless Indigenous underclass from the mainstream society and railroading them back into pre-contact tribal servitude.
No one’s calling out Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Murray on the gruesome fiction and exaggeration of their lurid imagination. Doubtless, there will have been abuse and bullying in some Indian Residential Schools (IRS) some of time, as in every boarding school everywhere some of the time, including the elite Upper Canada College and Ashbury. The history of boarding schools in England from earlier times suggests that there must have been some sadistic staff and also some pederasts. And there’s been a small handful of successful prosecutions for sexual abuse. But Mr. Sinclair, Ms. Murray and leaders of the victim cult have upgraded such abuses to genocide. That wretched calumny against Canada has reached worldwide, even stated by Pope Francis.
This is not the place for a critique of the Truth and Reconciliation report (TRC) except insofar as I’m looking at its connection with the Action Plan. Briefly, IRS attendees were encouraged by the prospect of getting money and there are anecdotal reports of attendees having been coached to make their stories more lurid. While doubtless some and perhaps many horror stories were true, with there having been no credible investigation, there’s no way of knowing which ones are true and which not. We do know for certain from the full TRC report and elsewhere that many IRS attendees benefited enormously from their schooling, and were grateful for it.
Among the many lies and exaggerations Mr. Sinclair and the oligarchs have foisted on the world is the one that the IRS caused today’s terrible dysfunction in Indigenous communities. The numbers contradict that falsehood. The extensive and reliable Hawthorn Report said that in 1962, out of a total of 146,596 Indian students attending various schools, just 8,391 were in residential establishments. Of those, 1,490 were living in hostels and they attended neighboring provincial or territorial schools. It follows that this combined total of IRS students was less than six percent of total student enrolment. Not only that, but it’s plain for all to see that almost all today’s oligarchs and success stories attended an IRS.
In accordance with the litany of falsehoods propounded by Mr. Sinclair, the lead sentence on the website for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation says this: “For a period of more than 150 years, First Nations, Inuit and Métis Nation children were taken from their families and communities to attend schools which were often located far from their homes.” Until 1920, attendance was voluntary. As the complete TRC report acknowledges, many parents wanted their children to attend an IRS. They took in many students whose families were unable to provide for them, including orphans. The unrebuttable fact is that school attendance became compulsory only in 1920 and even then attendance was not enforced. Many schools even had a waiting list for admission.
As there was throughout the wider community, there was a terrible death rate, primarily from TB, until about 1945 and the introduction then of antibiotics. It struck regardless of social standing. Contrary to the widely asserted falsehood, the death rate was consistently lower in residential schools than in home communities. TRC recognized the death of 3,200 attendees out of a total of some 150,000 during the century and half of IRS’ operations. But Mr. Sinclair has unilaterally come up with estimates of 6,000 and then a range of 15,000 to 25,000. Researcher Nina Green has found that the IRS were meticulous in filing reports of attendees’ deaths with the government as well as the corresponding death certificates. Mr. Sinclair’s malignant exaggerations have no foundation in reality.
All in all then, the Indigenous oligarchy has sold a bill of goods to the world, notably including naïve and willfully blind politicians as well as the youth they portray as professional victims. The lies and misrepresentations accord with the propaganda with which Joseph Goebbels led the Germans to believe in the attractions of Nazism:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
It’s no coincidence that Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Murray want the gullible Justice Minister David Lametti to criminalize those who question their authenticity!
As happened in South Africa, Canada’s Action Plan envisions separate privileges, laws, opportunities and standing based on race, in this case for the Indigenous. From an economic perspective, there’s some comparison with the national decline since the 1940s of Argentina, then a world’s equal richest country and despite having resources, population and land mass similar to Canada’s. Mr. Sinclair said how he saw the challenge in 2015, in the TRC summary report:
Together, Canadians must do more than just talk about reconciliation; we must learn how to practice reconciliation in our everyday lives—within ourselves, and our families, and in our communities, governments, places of worship, schools, and workplaces. To do so constructively, Canadians must remain committed to the ongoing work of establishing and maintaining respectful relationships.
There’s no other way to interpret this condescending claptrap than as advocacy for donations to poor dejected panhandlers outside the liquor store. Why’s Mr. Sinclair stating the case for condescension and patronizing the Indigenous? Is he really advancing the proposition that the marginalized Indigenous lack capacity to compete with the white man and the more recently ascendant Asian? In case anyone’s still wondering, it’s now established beyond any shadow of doubt that inherent intelligence and street smarts fall within the same range for all humans regardless of ethnicity.
There are, of course, cultural and attitudinal differences between peoples, and notably between those of the hunter-gatherer-trapper and those, say, of the rice-culture people of Asia. That’s the theme of the book Culture Matters, essays edited by Lawrence E Harrison, author of several books including Underdevelopment is a state of mind, and by Samuel P. Huntington, author of many books including The Clash of Civilizations. When it comes to culture, there’s a perceptive passage in Volume 5 of the complete TRC report that explains a crucial part of the challenge:
According to the national Inuit women’s association, Pauktuutit, it “would not be considered appropriate ... to tell a child what to do, as this would be the equivalent of ordering an elder or another adult about, thus violating an important social rule in Inuit culture.” Ignorance of this aspect of Inuit culture caused many non-Aboriginal people, including residential school administrators and child welfare officials, to make culturally biased judgments. They often saw Inuit parents as extremely permissive and indifferent to discipline. At the residential schools, in contrast, teachers attempted to control a child’s behaviour through corporal punishment and other harsh disciplinary measures distasteful to Inuit parents
When survival on the land imposed its own imperatives, this aspect of Indigenous culture was seldom a problem. Either you learned to do what was necessary, and did it, or you suffered the untimely death that constantly stalked you on land or sea. Today structure, discipline and work ethic are necessary to prepare for a successful and rewarding life in the high-tech economy. Or for holding any job at all. Under the welfare state, many parents see no need to impose structure in the home, to value education, to read books to children or even to have a discussion around the dining table. I’ve had Indigenous adults tell me I’m the only person they’ve had a real discussion with in their entire lives. Many parents don’t have regular mealtimes and are casual about sending their children to school let alone supervising homework. And the authorities don’t enforce timely or even any attendance at school. According to the progressive education of our time, it’s not in the culture, you know. This mindset carries forward into adulthood so that many would-be managers are unable to give direction to subordinate employees—an obvious necessity in the wage-economy. It’s the polar opposite, often found in Asian Canadian families, of parenting that enforces the doing of homework or practicing the violin.
According to all standard measures of societal dysfunction, it’s beyond any shadow of doubt that the quality of life for the marginalized, along with their mental health, has collapsed in the past half century. Arguably, that’s happened in conjunction with the expansion of the welfare state, and caused by it. As a recent example, the disbursement of monthly Covid support cheques for $2,000, many secured by fraudulent applications, went straight to bikers and the Mafia for drugs. Already in 1974 in the preface to his book People of the Deer, Farley Mowat wrote of the incipient societal collapse:
Canadian Eskimos (Inuit) have been broken away from the support of their land (which is theirs no longer) and live clustered in modern slums—many of which are hardly better than ghettoes. … Here they exist for the most part on welfare payments of one kind or another—no longer taking sustenance from the land and the sea. Effectively they live in unguarded concentration camps, provided with the basic requirement for mere physical survival, but deprived of the freedom to shape their own lives. We have salved our national conscience by ensuring that they do not die any more of outright starvation ….
Mr. Sinclair does nothing useful to address the challenge of why the marginalized are suffering. Not only that, but his platform guarantees a continuing downward spiral. What Mr. Sinclair implies, in the quotation above about reconciliation, represents the polar opposite of Martin Luther King’s call for his four children to be judged—yes, judged—by their character and not by the colour of their skin. If human rights are to be meaningful for everyone, then by what logic can it be right to override Nelson Mandela’s goal and vision of one set of laws, and one set of standards, for all races? By what logic then could it be right to establish Indigenous ethnicity and standing on a different level from that of every other Canadian? OK, so you think white Canadians are privileged! What then about Asian Canadians who’ve overcome equally serious discrimination as Blacks and the Indigenous, with many far surpassing the achievements of their white counterparts?
For all three major commissions of inquiry (RCAP, TRC and MMIWG), there was evidently just one instance where anyone asked young people for their view of the world. Even as it didn’t deliver proposals for remediation, the 1995 background paper for RCAP on suicide, Choosing Life, correctly reported what many still say:
Aboriginal youth described both exclusion from the dominant society and alienation for the now-idealized but once-real “life on the land” that is stereotypically associated with aboriginality. The terrible emptiness of feeling strung between two cultures and psychologically at home in neither has been described in fiction and in art, as well as in testimony given before the Commission. If they have few positive role models or clear paths to follow, Aboriginal youth may be forced to turn to one another, building tight bonds against a hostile world. This inward-looking subculture may reinforce hopelessness and self-hate, and their exits may appear to be the oblivion of drugs and alcohol—or death.
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Reduced to basics, leaders who don’t speak for followers aim to leave marginalized youth stranded on the pretext of rejuvenating that idealized but once-real life on the land.
These oligarchs depend on the continuing deprivation of the marginalized as justification for their own prominence and enrichment. Same thing for the political elite that preys on Canadians’ sense of guilt and generosity. The thing is that if every able-bodied Indigenous of employable age were gainfully employed, the oligarchs would be out of business except for ceremonial functions.
There’s no stopping the empire-builders and their lust for money and power. As something of a side-issue, but an important one, there’s the Action Plan’s expansion of the definition of indigeneity and the corresponding delivery of benefits to the Métis. The number of Canadians who could find some Indigenous connection is vast, and it’s said to include most French Canadians. How can taxpayers countenance this expansion? Logically to my way of thinking, and even if any distinction by ethnicity were appropriate anyway, there’s a case for saying that status should expire upon there being less than a 50 percent bloodline. For example, Jody Wilson-Raybould’s mother’s white and so’s her husband. Should her children be classified as Indian? I think not. The ostensibly Inuit Governor General Mary Simon’s father was a white manager for the Hudson’s Bay Company. She was ruled, therefore, ineligible for attendance at a residential school. And when her father died, the obituary said he left 155 descendants. How many of them qualify as Indigenous?
In order to understand where the push in Canada for UNDRIP is coming from, you need to understand the structure of Canada’s Indigenous society today. It resembles that of George Orwell’s novel 1984, based on the hierarchy of the former Soviet Union. There’s a rich and privileged elite that includes Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Murray, as well as most chiefs and leaders.
The next tier comprises the drones, mostly employed in make-work jobs taking in each other’s laundry or in the offices of government and native organizations.
At the bottom is the proletariat that should be the real concern to decent Canadians. They’re the burgeoning underclass of multi-generational welfare recipients, under-educated, unskilled, unemployed and all but unemployable except for part-time and seasonal jobs. Many of them are addicted to drugs and alcohol. They live in squalor in violence-wracked remote settlements and urban slums.
The cadaver of an Inuit woman found in a shallow grave in Ottawa’s Vanier represents the tragic reality. Mary Papatsie was 38, by all accounts a pleasant person. She worked the street—and you know what that means—to feed her addiction to drugs and alcohol. And she was the mother of ten children she couldn’t possibly look after. Similarly, an acquaintance asked me why another attractive young woman from Nunavut would want to leave her community on Baffin Island to live by prostitution on the streets of Ottawa. My answer was because she believed it was better than what her life was at home. More and better food and clothing are available, it’s not so cold for so long, and even on the streets of Vanier it’s less dangerous.
Typically and as retired Manitoba Judge Brian Giesbrecht says of this misery, the Indigenous population of his province is less than 10% of the total, but their children represent 90% of the children in care. At any given time there are about 11,000 children in the care of the province’s child welfare agencies. The Action Plan calls for the Indigenous to run their own child-welfare system, with ever more taxpayers’ money to sustain it. There’s no recognition of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and violence perpetrated by family members and those in authority. There’s no examination of how and why so many children are in such desperate need in the first place, let alone how to turn things around.
The Action Plan carries forward this shockingly inadequate passage from MMIWG that has its origins in RCAP, with a mindset that’s deep-seated in current orthodoxy:
Guided by the findings of the Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and the Métis-specific calls for Miskotahâ, [which means] work to end systemic violence against Indigenous women, girls, and gender-diverse people by:
• Continuing to implement the Federal Pathway to address the root causes of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQI+ people
• Developing a comprehensive Violence Prevention Strategy to expand culturally relevant gender-based supports for Indigenous women, children, families and 2SLGBTQI+ people facing gender-based violence
• Working in partnership with Indigenous peoples and organizations, as well as provincial and territorial governments, and other partners to develop effective and culturally-appropriate solutions for people seeking to escape abusive environments including access to safe housing, shelters, counselling services, legal assistance and healing projects, across the country including on reserve, in the north and in urban areas.
Any time someone in government says they’re going to work on doing something, or developing it, you can guarantee it’ll go into the black hole of meetings and consultations so nothing actually happens. But the key phrase here is Continuing to implement the Federal Pathway to address the root causes of violence … That’s bureaucratic gobbledygook. Here’s the root cause that’s gone missing and which Indigenous leaders and the likes of Ministers Carolyn Bennett and Marc Miller sweep under the carpet. It’s that women who are educated and skilled and are engaged in or are preparing for rewarding employment seldom disappear, get murdered or commit suicide. The same goes for men. Few of those enabled as equal citizens in the mainstream society become addicts, spouse-batterers, child-molesters or panhandlers. And they seldom go to prison.
The even more shocking corollary is that none of the commissioners even hinted in their reports, nor elsewhere, that the marginalized Indigenous should get the education, sports and recreation, and opportunity for a rewarding career that they had in their own childhood and youth.
At the heart of the human tragedy is failure to resolve this two-part question. Should Canada enable next generations for participation in the high-tech economy as equal citizens? Or should next generations expect to live according to some presumably modified version of the hunter-gatherer-trapper lifestyle?
In Volume 5 of his 1967 report Eskimo Administration, anthropologist Diamond Jenness dynamited delusions about maintaining any kind of pre-contact lifestyle:
The first white men who gave Eskimos guns and ammunition, steel knives and metal cooking pots in reward for their service or for their furs destroyed their independence by creating needs that could only be satisfied by association and trade with the outside world. The Eskimos saw and craved numberless things from that world which seemed to make life easier or more pleasant, and little by little they lost the skills and the knowledge which their forefathers had acquired under the stress of isolation, and handed down to generation after generation of their descendants. …
It is criminal folly, therefore to suggest, as is often done, even today, that we should encourage them to take up again the life of their forefathers, and endeavour to recover their independence by hunting and fishing in regions where game has not ceased to be plentiful. Hunting and fishing may provide them with food and even clothing, but it cannot bring in the income they need to buy rifles and ammunition, boats and outboard motors, and all the other articles of civilization without which they would perish almost as rapidly as we would.
Criminal folly! Since the repudiation of Jean Chrétien’s 1969 Policy Statement, however, oligarchs, politicians and the wider Canadian public have fallen in line with the iconography of the pre-Columbian, pre-industrial Garden of Eden.
This preamble leads to the elephantine problem with the claims of Indigenous oligarchs, and the popularly accepted orthodoxy embodied in the Action Plan. TRC’s Recommendation 43 comprises the keystone response to ongoing misery:
We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial and municipal governments to fully adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as the framework for reconciliation.
In turn, UNDRIP says this:
Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.
But here’s the clincher. Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of apartheid in South Africa, set out his mission statement as follows in a 1958 speech:
The policy of separate development is the basis of the happiness, security and stability which are maintained by means of a homeland, a language and a government peculiar to each people.
Around the world, self-determination without managerial competence has been a disaster. On the face of it, tribalism and self-determination are attractive, as Karl Popper points out in The Open Society and its Enemies. Getting tribal self-governance purports to offer compensation for past wrongs, reward without effort, and freedom from personal responsibility—a perpetual Club Med of the North. By some kind of magic, money to sustain Indigenous self-determination is expected to flow from oil-wells, mines and forestry operations, all controlled by the Indigenous. For promulgation of this message, the reality of history is immaterial, that tribalism saps initiative, ambition and self-respect. There’s no concern that this dream must fail, and for the same reason that communism failed in the former Soviet Union. It fails to respect the individual.
Upon achieving self-determination (independence or decolonization), new leaders assume power with much chest-thumping, and people celebrate. But the template repeated over and over again, as in Africa, is that oligarchs step into the shoes of the colonizers and then exploit more than ever the authoritarianism and corruption afforded by their new-found power.
One of the many ironies inherent in the pursuit of self-determination is the enthusiasm with which former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney embraced the establishment of Inuit self-government in Nunavut—now Canada’s own Banana Bantustan. The irony is that on June 18, 1990 he welcomed Nelson Mandela in the House of Commons and said this, “The very notion of South Africa’s apartheid was anathema to me ….” He later wrote in his memoirs. … “I viewed apartheid with the same degree of disgust that I attached to the Nazis—the authors of the most odious offence in modern history.”
A foundational problem with the Action Plan and conventional orthodoxy is failure to understand that people of many cultures—for example, Chinese, Ukrainian and Jewish Canadians—engage with the high-tech economy while also carrying forward those aspects of their culture that remain relevant in modern times. It would be patronizing and wrong to suggest that the Indigenous have any lesser capacity for achieving both objectives.
Unlike the three big commissions of inquiry, Ontario’s Royal Commission on the Northern Environment did ask young people for their thoughts when, decades ago, I was the advisor on education. Parents and youth in remote settlements universally said they wanted full-fledged mainstream education. And they believed it was compatible with learning traditional skills. Of course, university-educated game management officers and wildlife biologists achieve both objectives. So do children who grow up on a farm. Unfortunately, I was unable to persuade Commissioner Ed Fahlgren to consider how better delivery of education might achieve what the people said they wanted. He came up with what I construed at the time, and still do, as the unsatisfactory response that unschooled Indians should take control of education “because they couldn’t do any worse that we’ve done.”
For all the inadequacy of education delivered to the Indigenous, it needs to be said that it’s not only for them that education in Canada is unsatisfactory. Everyone knows of recent concerns about the promotion of woke causes and the sexualization of what happens in the classroom that supplants the actual delivery of schooling. In our age of progressive education, a friend of mine, recently retired, told me of his experience when teaching Grade 7 in Ottawa. He said a number of students arrived in his class who still hadn’t learned their times tables.
As I set out below, there are templates for delivering schooling successfully even to the most disadvantaged kids. But for next Indigenous generations, the most ruinous objective of the Action Plan’s is to devolve control of education to the Indigenous. How can you justify to the children, and have it on your conscience accordingly, to devolve responsibility for education to those who, themselves, are barely educated? That’s like the proverbial exercise of having the blind leading the blind. Few Indigenous oligarchs, Indian or Inuit, have the faintest idea what STEM disciplines actually comprise (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). It’s beyond their comprehension that the high-tech economy offers the prime prospects for employment for next generations. It’s delusional at best, therefore, to think that leaders of self-governing communities, newly empowered by the Action Plan, could put in place and supervise schooling that complies with the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. It calls for delivery of education that maximizes the child’s potential.
It’s eluded oligarchs and the writers of the Action Plan that, logically, self-determination requires Indigenous managers and professionals in the territories they claim. And, of course, the mainstream economy has those same needs. As long as their credentials meet accepted standards, it would be irrelevant whether the qualified Indigenous worked in their own territories or elsewhere. For example, both world-renowned Indian architect Douglas Cardinal and similarly renowned Inuit thoracic surgeon Noah Carpenter served the wider community. And they both happened to be former residential school students. There are certainly more jobs in arctic and subarctic Canada than there are Indigenous of employable age. But the mining companies Baffinland and Agnico-Eagle have fewer than 20 percent Inuit employees and they work mostly in jobs like minding a CCTV monitor or a gas pump. They’re not the geologists, engineers or supervisors. Those companies pay very good wages. But there’s no ladder to go higher for those lacking basic literacy and numeracy, let alone more advanced skills.
The self-determination that the Action plan envisions exists already in Canada, in Nunavut. The disaster for taxpayers starts with its burdensome cost of $100,000 annually per Inuk—some $400,000 for a family of four—to sustain the territorial government. There are exorbitantly paid figureheads at the top. But managers and professionals from outside do all the real work. At my last count, for example, there was just one Inuit accountant out of 200 in the territorial government, and he was raised and educated in the South.
With it known since about 1980 that self-determination was coming, and achieved in 1999, it should have been possible to educate and train Inuit youth for those managerial and professional jobs. With that not having happened, the oligarchs grumble that Inuktitut is not the language of business, commerce and governance. How could it be otherwise? The legislators even want to enforce instruction in Inuktitut through to Grade 12. Currently, Inuit children get instruction in Inuktitut until Grade 4 and only then start reading in English, using books for preschoolers. You may well wonder what pupils actually learn in those first three grades. A report at Nunatsiaq News online tells of mindless blather in the legislature about the Education Act and preserving Inuktitut. This comment on the story reflects education as they actually deliver it:
I have a kid in grade 8. There are kids in his class who still cannot read or write. And kids [at the end of November] who have not attended one day of school since September. There is no one solution; everyone has to be held accountable. The system here is “easier” than other provinces. Those who graduate grade 12 looking to continue to other institutions then have to spend a year or more “upgrading”. How can anyone expect to enforce this bill when they can’t even keeps kids in school?
As the writer says, there’s no enforcement of attendance in school. A young man who stayed the course for what passes for graduation in Iqaluit, told me his schooling was torture by boredom. His brother also graduated, ostensibly, from high school. He achieved that with one art class in Grade 12 requiring no homework or any substantive creativity. He couldn’t write a competent letter ordering parts for a snowmobile. For another example, a mother who moved to Ottawa from Rankin Inlet told me her son’s Grade 7 there barely rated as Grade 3 in the South.
There are templates around the world, notably but by no means exclusively in Asia, where education has lifted Third World peoples into the First in a single generation. Why not Canada’s Third World Indigenous? Programs for delivery to the most marginalized in the United States include the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Success Academy, along with the huge support program Teach for America.
This is not the place to set out an implementation plan for delivery of education. It’s glaringly obvious, though, that schooling simply passes by large numbers of Indigenous youth. The stock response for remediation is affirmative action, the lowering of standards so that the disadvantaged don’t have to achieve what’s expected of others in order to get a next step up. The better way, and the only way that respects the individual, is to deliver supplementary support along the way. Many school-age children are unfit and even morbidly obese, so schools need to include a daily exercise class. They also need to provide supplementary tutoring for those who are lagging as well as organized after-school activities and supervised homework in the classroom. I’ll mention one book that shows what intensive education can do for those seemingly beyond help. It’s Rafe Esquith’s There Are No Shortcuts: How an inner-city teacher—winner of the American Teacher Award—inspires his students and challenges us to rethink the way we educate our children.
In his book, Dances with Dependency: Indigenous success through self-reliance, published in 2006, Calvin Helin tells of young Indigenous thriving when immersed intensively in basic education:
Grandview/?Uuquinak’uuh Elementary School in East Vancouver is a story in hard-won success in achieving results for Aboriginal and inner city kids. Located in one of the poorest neighbourhoods. The school is about 50pc Aboriginal, and most of the rest immigrants from China, Vietnam, Mexico, Nicaragua and the former Yugoslavia. An article in the G&M reported:
”You can’t fool the kids,” says Ms. Fouks [She’s the teacher that implemented the effective phonics literacy program]. “They know when they’re not succeeding.” The widespread failure of Aboriginal kids in the school system is probably Canada’s most urgent education problem. But Ms. Krause is impatient with the fashionable notion that more cultural sensitivity is the answer. The answer, she says emphatically, is “academic success.” And her teaching team has delivered. Sylvain Desbiens, the math teacher, confesses that when he started four years ago, he thought he’d be doing mostly remedial teaching. “I never thought I’d be teaching gifted programs.” He does now.
While as almost everywhere, the political situation is open to criticism, multi-ethnic multilingual Singapore shows what could have been done for the Indigenous, and still could be. There are four official languages and English is not one of them. But from the outset, the language of instruction in school is English, only. Upon independence in 1965, Premier Lee faced the challenge of what to do for 60,000 Indigenous Malays living in a terrible Asian slum. He began a ten-year rehousing program along with delivery of intensive education. By the 1990s children of relocates were doing Masters degrees at Berkeley and Cambridge, in physics and architecture. In 1965 Canada had three times Singapore’s per capita GDP. Today Singapore’s exceeds Canada’s by 50 percent.
When Standard Oil of California acquired oil leases in Saudi Arabia in 1933, the government required them to proceed to 100 percent Saudi employment. They hired young nomadic Bedouin, the equivalent of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, educated them intensively, and trained them for the entire range of skilled employment. They built and staffed hospitals and schools, and provided interest-free loans for employees to buy their own housing. Ali bin Ibrahim Al-Naimi left the desert for the company school at the age of twelve. They taught him English and he finished school at the American high school in Beirut. Next, he got a degree in geology at Lehigh University in the United States and then did a Master’s degree at Stanford. In due course he became president of Aramco, and he recently retired as Saudi Arabia’s oil minister. Imagine where youth in Canada’s North could have been today had responsibility for education, health care and housing been vested in Baffinland Iron mines and Agnico-Eagle!
Former hedge fund manager Jonathan Starr, having personal connections to the former British Somaliland, supports a residential school there, the significantly named Abaarso School of Science and Technology. It teaches English and delivers education to girls and boys, from around the age of twelve, and it’s sufficiently intensive to enable entry to American universities. Who would ever think to name a Canadian Indigenous school for science and technology?
But here’s another Canadian template. Half a century ago, Catholic priest Father Jean-Marie Mouchet organized a cross-country ski program in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. It provided the core for Canada’s cross-country ski team in three consecutive Winter Olympics. As long as the program lasted, the community’s problems stabilized, and many students went on to university.
Ironically, in his memoirs in Inuktitut in the 1960s Peter Pitseolak wrote that he expected his grandchildren could become full-fledged medical doctors. Given what passes for education in Nunavut today, there’s no reasonable prospect of any Inuit graduate from the territory’s school system achieving that goal in any foreseeable future.
An important sidebar issue with respect to education is the societal challenge that Indigenous inmates comprise an excessively high proportion of the prison population. There are significantly more Indigenous in Canada’s hell-hole prisons today than there ever were at peak enrolment in residential schools. And by almost every criterion, conditions are worse there than any residential school can have ever been. In the entire TRC report there’s not a single credible instance reported of a murder in a residential school. But murders, as well as beatings, rapes and other ghastly abuse, are commonplace among the Indigenous in Canada’s prisons. I know personally of such a murder in jail that the administration should have been averted. In fairness, I must say the perpetrator tells me he’s being treated reasonably.
The current thrust is toward keeping the Indigenous out of prison, often on the basis of spurious reasoning. Two results follow immediately. The first is that there are potential victims out there who need protection. The second is that there really are dangerous people who need to be locked up.
But there’s another issue that strikes at the heart of the Action Plan’s wrong-headedness. It needs to be said that smudging, sweat lodges and native healing don’t work. And never can be made to work. By definition, the Orwellian-named Corrections Service should prepare inmates for self-reliance and employment so they don’t come back again. Many need to start with learning to read and write. Most could learn a trade like carpentry, small engine repair and fixing computers. The prisons in Norway and Holland provide a template for how prisons in Canada could function, lowering the recidivism rate, lowering the cost of operation and providing a satisfying workplace for the custodians. They do triage to separate out the few beyond helping. Most of the rest get education and skills training, work release, and help getting a job upon release..
Most unsatisfactory of all are the conditions for incarcerated juveniles—those you might think most of all needing help that works. By contrast, the renowned Irish writer Brendan Behan was in Borstal (reform school) in England between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Along with his own motivation, intensive education there helped to enable his eventual success.
There’s a case for helping the Indigenous to move to southern Canada from remote settlements having no economic reason to exist. That’s what Newfoundland’s Joey Smallwood did half a century ago when he closed down most of the outports, relocating some 30,000 people. Deservedly so, many refugees get free transportation and support systems on arrival in Canada. So why not for our own people trapped, as Farley Mowat put it, in the equivalent of unguarded concentration camps? The challenge then, of course, would be to provide support and to find accommodation that’s already swamped by newly arriving immigrants. Immigrants do, in fact, get considerable support. But not the Indigenous. I took a middle-aged Ojibwa woman to the YM/YWCA in Ottawa, which provides support and mentoring for those in need, apparently with considerable success. They help clients with challenges like finding accommodation, setting up a bank account and finding a suitable training course for subsequent employment. Sunshine (her real middle name!) and I were sitting at the table to fill out the application form when a big black man came over and asked who we were and where we came from. Upon being told Sunshine was Indigenous, he said words to the effect, “I don’t know why you’re here. This place is for immigrants.” Devastated and humiliated, Sunshine couldn’t get up fast enough to leave.
There’s another foundational problem with UNDRIP. The Action Plan would transfer control of most wealth-generation from natural resources to Indigenous oligarchs. UNDRIP would have Canada vacate the state’s paramount right to specify land-use, with compensation, when there’s a national priority. UNDRIP’s Article 32 requires “the free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.” Any development, however distant, could be said to affect Indigenous lands. This wording imparts a right of veto, with no mechanism for resolving an impasse. Worse, the courts have been using the product of their own invention, the honour of the Crown, to endorse Indigenous claims regardless of rational argumentation or the national interest.
In the past, there have always been some advocates for the enabling of next generations for the modern world. Like Jenness a half-century ago, they recognized that the fur trade, now essentially extinct, was too unreliable to provide economic self-reliance. When taking Treaty in 1876, Chief Poundmaker said he expected equality of opportunity and recognition,
When I commence to settle on the lands to make a living for myself and my children, I beg of you to assist me in every way possible. When I am at a loss how to proceed, I want the advice and assistance of the government. The children yet unborn, I wish you to treat them in like manner as they advance in civilization like the white man.
And in the March 1953 edition of The Beaver, then Minister of Northern Affairs Jean Lesage wrote of his intended policy for Inuit:
The objective of Government policy … is to give the Eskimos (Inuit) the same rights, privileges, opportunities, and responsibilities as all other Canadians. In short to enable them to share fully the national life of Canada. … The task … is to help him adjust his life and his thoughts to all that the encroachment of this new life must mean. … The natural food resources of the Arctic are limited and the primitive Eskimo was a part of the balance of nature. As soon as we take measures to provide against starvation, to eradicate tuberculosis, to end infant exposure, and to improve health generally, we upset that balance.
For all that oligarchs clamour for a return to the lifestyle of bygone times, can you imagine oligarchs like Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Murray putting together a dog-team and going out on the trapline? Or managing a shoe factory in northern Ontario to compete with China? Put another way, it’s racist bigotry that MMIWG Commissioner Marion Buller neglected to examine the profile of individual murdered and missing women so as to avert the corresponding risks in future. And it’s racist bigotry to withhold from Indigenous youth the kind of educational trajectory that enabled Inuit heart surgeon Donna May Kimmaliardjuk. Do you hear that Minister Miller? Without prompting, an Ojibwa grandmother said to me, “I simply don’t care about my land. It doesn’t do a damned thing for us any more.”
The self-serving agitprop that promotes UNDRIP contrasts absolutely with any sense of reality let alone the aspirations for equality of standing demanded in Martin Luther King’s 1963 Dream speech. It conflicts totally with Chief Dan George's 1967 Lament for Confederation speech:
I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success—his education, his skills, and with these tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society. So shall I shatter the barriers of our isolation.
In sum, Canadians need to know that the entire concept of UNDRIP and the Action Plan is unconscionable for next Indigenous generations. And under any conceivable configuration, the legal constraints are unmanageable and the cost to cost taxpayers is unsustainable.
Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, several causes have coalesced around what’s euphemistically called reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous. Naïve and sentimental progressivism permeates everywhere, even into Canada’s Supreme Court. The worrisome thing is how such demagoguery, like Hitler’s, sets the stage for tyranny. Instead of Orwell, the variant for our time would more likely be Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It would have society collapsing by amusing itself to death with the technology of social media. All too relevant are the examples from earlier times set out in the 1841 book by Charles MacKay, and still in print, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:
In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. … Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
In conclusion, I rest my case that Canada’s Action Plan for the Indigenous, in its own way, combines many of the worst aspects of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) as well as the mission statement of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid in South Africa. I also rest my case that remediation is possible, by way of intensive education that aims for full-fledged integration of the Indigenous into the high-tech economy. And yes, a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.
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Colin Alexander was publisher of the Yellowknife News of the North and the advisor on education for Ontario’s Royal Commission on the Northern Environment.
Thanks for reading. For more on this topic read Manufacturing a Genocide by Michelle Stirling.
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Colin Alexander was publisher of the Yellowknife News of the North. His forthcoming book, to be published soon by Frontier Centre for Public Policy, is Justice on Trial: Truckers Freedom Convoy and other problematic cases.