Children of the Juggernaut Ric Dolphin
If Indian leaders and the government won’t save native kids from a life of despair, then maybe someone else should
The fun of being a pundit is the fun of an assassin who fears no retribution. We breeze out of our burrows, let loose a volley, and chuckling at the cleverness of it all, breeze back in. In our more pretentious moments, we’ll tell ourselves (and often others) how we serve the vital purpose of challenging conventional thought, skewering bloated shibboleths, et cetera; and that our endless outpourings of criticism are rendered in the constructive spirit of correction. But rarely do we actually provide any solutions beyond the extinction of the problem. In a nutshell: the emperor has no clothes, down with the emperor, thank you for reading and goodbye.
Happily for us, people have always enjoyed seeing emperors attacked, and we assassins are adequately rewarded and occasionally praised for the style with which we discharge our weapons. This encourages us to the point where we even believe we are shooting real bullets, despite the continuing habit of emperors to live their nude and happy lives.
Anyway, a couple of issues back, I took aim at Canada’s Indian industry and feel a need to follow up with a little constructivism to mitigate the guilt I feel at having blasted away at such an easy target.
As targets go, Canada’s Indian policy is like a barn wall at 10 paces. The situation for the majority of this country’s million-or-so Indians and Inuit is a national embarrassment informed by a grand fallacy, preserved by a multi-billion dollar payroll that undermines any real hope for a change in the status quo. I used the Labradorian Innu reserve of Natuashish to illustrate these points. Natuashish is a blatant example of everything that’s wrong with Indian policy: rampant substance abuse, family disintegration, corrupt band leadership, a federal government throwing millions of our dollars at the problem with no real benefit, and so forth.
Of course, Natuashish is just one of the more visible boils of the plague that infects much of aboriginal society in Canada. Most of the country’s other couple of thousand reserves present in similar ways. Talk to a social worker in one of Alberta’s oil-rich reserves, like those at Hobbema or Stoney, and you’ll hear the same sorts of stories of child neglect and abuse, suicide and despair.
Look at the off-reserve, inner-city populations of Edmonton, Saskatoon or Winnipeg, and you’ll discover similar symptoms with an added wrinkle: a burgeoning population of teenaged males who have adopted the baggy jeans and sideways ball caps, the obscene music, and the criminal aspirations of the American ghetto gangsta—cool bros doing the dirty work for their aging Hells Angels masters in Quebec mansions.
Pop up to Nunavut and you’ll discover a whole territory created on the dysfunctional tenets of Canada’s Indian policy, which can be reduced to the following simple formula: more money + more self government = greater despair.
Despite the caterwauling from the Phil Fontaines, the Paul Okaliks and other Ottawa-suckled native emperors, more “funding” for more “healing” has not solved the problem, cannot solve the problem. Natuashish should prove this once and for all.
I do not believe natives are intellectually inferior to non-natives. More than half of the native population is law-abiding and hard-working. It’s a little publicized fact that a far greater percentage of aboriginals are abstemious than are non-aboriginals.
Unhappily, the disproportionate percentage of social ills among natives tends to burden the community as a whole with a collective reputation—“drunken Indians,” “welfare bums,” et cetera—that doesn’t engender a lot of pride or confidence. And the reserve system, presided over by and elite of unaccountable chiefs and their clans, relegates the non-family-compact members to a state of dependency that would be familiar to citizens of the former Soviet Union. No one is allowed to freely own property, and the ruling class dispenses housing and welfare with a paternalism that would have impressed Stalin. Off reserve, the paternal role is taken up by the social workers and other government professionals whose proliferating presence works against any progress among natives in the direction of self-sufficiency.
In short, the prevailing culture becomes one of why bother, and what’s the use? The chiefs, Indian Affairs officials, and countless others in the Indian industry—concerned, as we all are, with the preserving their powers, and their salaries—know that the best way of maintaining the status quo is to maintain the culture of despair and dependency: you poor little Indians. So hard done by. Don’t worry; we’ll protect you. Trust us.
Indian leaders and the politicians and bureaucrats who shovel out the public funds are certainly not about to topple this ridiculous juggernaut. So who will help? The impetus will have to come from the aboriginal people themselves. I know from talking to certain iconoclasts among their population that not everyone ascribes to the official doctrine of victimology that has underpinned the Indian movement for the past two generations. I was recently talking to a Peigan youth worker from the southern Alberta reserve of Piikani, who voiced the sacrilegious opinion that residential schools did more good than harm. It was his opinion that the schools—which often removed children from horrible homes—produced citizens who appreciated the value of hard work and tended to be less inclined to the bad habits for which the community as a whole is known.
His comments were made with the understanding that his identity would not be revealed. The juggernaut does not take kindly to those who challenge the official position of the residential schools—despite much evidence to the contrary—were the worst thing since Auschwitz. He also had nice things to say about former Assembly of First Nations national chief Matthew Coon Come for speaking out against the drinking and smoking among his fellow AFN pooh-bahs, comments that ensured his defeat in the ensuing election.
The presence of these rebels is heartening. But they are timid and need moral support if they are ever to create a counterforce to the juggernaut. And it won’t come from the current Indian leadership or from governments. They are the juggernaut. Outside forces will be required.
I would suggest that it is time for business leaders to come to the fore. Business and Indians together should create a national organization whose mission will be to break the cycle of welfare dependency and self-pity, and replace it with means by which the natives can reclaim their pride and become fully functioning members of modern Canadian society.
Such means might include—avert your eyes now, all you juggernaut liberals—a new kind of residential school. Why not test it at Natuashish? Having spoken to a couple of social workers involved with a detoxification of gasoline-sniffing kids from Natuashish, along with a Mountie on the reserve, I heard an exaggerated version of a situation that is typical on most reserves. Substance abuse is rampant among the kids because it’s rampant among their parents. The parents were dropouts themselves and tend not to care if their children attend school, so the children tend to truancy. Since the state provides enough housing and social assistance payments to ensure a lifetime supply of sustenance and intoxicants without the necessity to work, there is no pecuniary incentive to academic devotion. Pastimes among the young include vandalism (the number one crime in Natuashish), throwing dogs off a cliff to watch them die, and listening to rap music while under the influence of gasoline, crack cocaine or rye. Suicide pacts among teens are a current craze.
One social worker I spoke to had vivid memories of a 15-year-old boy from Davis Inlet (the community the Indians lived in before being transferred to the brand new $350-million village of Natuashish), who had spent five months in a group home, drying out from gasoline. The boy, a tall, athletic hockey player and hunter who spoke little English, adapted well. He cried on the social worker’s shoulder the night before he was sent back to Labrador and his drunken parents. The social worker flew back with him to spend a couple of days at the community. The first thing he saw when he landed at the small airstrip was a sign with the large spray-painted letters “F--- You.” He remembers the boy’s father hadn’t bathed in decades and amused himself by driving his state-provided snowmobile around in circles in a field all day. Some weeks after the reunion, the boy hanged himself.
The social worker believes there is no hope for Natuashish’s young, short of pulling them out of the community and putting them in foster homes. I would propose that our newly formed organization of Indian leaders and mainstream business people—perhaps we’d call it the White Buffalo Institute, after the Plains Indian symbol of hope—build a boarding school near Natuashish instead.
It would be secular and founded on the principles of self-reliance, free enterprise, academic or vocational achievement, traditional outdoor skills, and sports. It would be staffed as much as possible by native teachers, would teach Indian history (without the undue influence of victimology that informs university-level native studies programs). Students would reside at the school during the week and have the option of returning to their homes on weekends. Discipline would be enforced, not through corporal punishment, but through withholding of privileges—such as playing on the hockey team.
The overarching purpose of the school, financed solely through private donation, would be to break the cycle of misery and turn out a new generation of leaders immune to the blandishments of the victim society. If successful, the White Buffalo schools might be duplicated across the country, providing hope that the suffocating juggernaut that has been the Indian industry to date might finally be exterminated once and for all.
