Native rights

Most of the time, the majority of Canadians take an "out of sight, out of mind" approach to the country's aboriginal (or First Nation, or native, or Indian*) population.  They know that the conditions faced by these peoples are often harsh, but they tend either to despair of ever being able to do anything about it, or to blame it on the native people themselves.  Right now, however, native issues are on the front pages of the media, both nationally and locally.

At the national level, the chief of the native community of Attawapiskat, Teresa Spence, is currently on hunger strike in a tepee near Parliament Hill in Ottawa.  Attawapiskat is a God- and man-forsaken place in Northern Ontario, and Chief Spence wants a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper so that she can demand that something be done for her people.  Public response has been less than sympathetic, with a lot of commentators making snide references to Chief Spence's weight, while others have pointed out that large amounts of public money has been spent in Attawapiskat, to little obvious effect.

One gent on the radio phone-in show this morning said the PM should agree to meet with the Chief, on condition that there should be a full forensic accounting of all the taxpayer money that has gone into Attawapiskat over the decades.  Seems fair enough, until you stop to think that the Chief would be perfectly entitled to respond that the PM is in no position to lecture on the subject.  After all, this is a government that has wasted millions on a jet fighter tender that has now had to be sent back to the drawing board; whose predecessors spent millions on a national handgun register, a good though unpopular idea that was implemented with unimaginable inefficiency and is now being abandoned at great cost; and so on, back through generations of government at all levels.

Wasting taxpayer money is simply what politicians do.  If Chief Spence and her colleagues at the Assembly of First Nations are getting adept at it, well, they've had plenty of time to learn from their white counterparts. In any case, I'd much sooner have my taxes spent on well-meaning efforts to help natives (and the non-native poor for that matter) than on a lot of the other things that the government sees as higher priorities.

Meanwhile, at the local level, some folks are in a snit because a provincial park, Short Hills, is to be closed for the weekend so that local natives can stage a deer hunt.  The natives' right to do so, either for food or for ceremonial purposes, is enshrined in the Indian Act.  Only twenty hunters will be allowed each day, and they'll be using bows and arrows.  I'm no fan of hunting, but considering how many white folks in these parts go out every fall to shoot animals (and often enough, each other) with much more lethal weaponry, it seems churlish to object.

* I was involved in native financial issues during my previous spell in Canada, and was told by a number of native people that they don't object to the term "Indian", even though it makes some white people queasy.  In the first place, the native people are used to it; and in the second place, until the white men started using the term "Indian", the native peoples had no collective term for themselves.