Speak for yourself. I haven't raped any children nor beaten anything out of anybody. Me thinks you've been listening to too much of CB's propaganda.
...and the best way we can treat CB with respect is to stop treating him and his buddies like children. They can and should be looking after themselves just like everybody else.
By we I mean the dominant culture of which you and I are a part. We have taken everything away from the indigenous people including their land, their way of life, their culture, their identity and their self respect. I have been involved with indigenous people for 35 years. I know first hand the devastation wrought by the residential schools, where children, ripped from there families, received no love at all and when they had children they could not even hug them because emotionally they were dead inside, hundreds of thousands committed suicide, drank themselves into oblivion or hid behind a wall of drugs, numbing their hearts and souls.
Many have been climbing out of that pit that the dominant society dug for them. We, yes we, in the dominant society, destroyed their lives with our arrogance and ignorance in a egotistical attempt to "make them just like us". We shoved our religions and language down their throat and even if the conformed to our standards we still rejected them for being other than "white". Ask the Chinese, Japanese and East Indians how we treat anybody that isn't of European descent. We treated our indigenous people worse than animals. Now they are making a comeback, sobering up, getting clean, getting post secondary educations, jobs, getting "respectable" but society still treats many of them like savages, with fear or contempt. It has been a long hard road for many indigenous people, many are still struggling with deep seated emotional trauma and attitudes like yours are not helping.
This is not a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. The people are regaining their pride, but the DIA does not help. They put sticks in their way every step of the way. Bureaucracy steals 60% of the moneys allotted First Nations for "administrative costs" and takes land (expropriation) from their reserves for roads, golf courses, etc. and when the people have no recourse but to stand in the way of being robbed once again, they meet nothing but disdain and anger from the dominant culture who see them as standing in the way of "progress". They are standing up for their rights and in the way of more theft of their land, however useless it may be, it is all that we have left them. Perhaps you are not directly involved in the theft but governments do it in your name and instead of outrage at government, you shout angrily at those "backward and savage people" who are trying to protect their place at the "trough", their free ride.
Well I hold the dominant society with disdain and contempt for their attitude , disrespect and treatment of a people who are struggling to rediscover their identity, to find their place in a hostile world.
