New Media

>You know the hands-off approach to living alongside Aboriginal people isn’t working when the government has to call in the army to protect the band’s children from the parents.

Canadian Aboriginals held off from the predicted round of roadblocks and mass protests for a National Day of Action this week, presumably because the feds have decided to speed up treaty negotiations (since more than a century was probably seen as a little too long of a wait). It’s not just about the treaties, of course. Canadian First Nations are understandably upset over the Third-World conditions prevalent on their reserves as well as the almost-as-bad outcomes for Natives off reserve.

But as bad as things are on Canadian reserves, Australian Aborigine communities seem to taken it to the next level. The Australian government has mobilized the army to restore order on Aborigine reserves, where sexual abuse of children has pretty much become the norm.

Some Australian Aboriginal groups are complaining it smacks of racism. But from a pragmatic approach, if the Canadian government found out that virtually every family in Vancouver’s Kitsilano had started molesting their own kids as well as their neighbors, you’d expect a pretty heavy-handed response.

The reserve system hasn’t worked. Providing incentives for Aboriginals to live on poor, unproductive land, isolated from the rest of the nation, has resulted in pretty much what you’d expect of any group of people put in that kind of situation: total poverty and anarchy.

Giving the land back and evacuating the tens of millions of newcomers isn’t an option. Treaties will only go so far in alleviating the tragedy, whether in Canada or Australia. The only real option for the ones living on the worst of the reserves is for the government to pay to move them to whichever of the big cities or functioning reserves they want and tear down the ones that have already fallen apart from the inside.

Kudos to the Conservatives for putting Native land claims back on the fast track. New legislation to be co-written with Aboriginals will hopefully clear up a backlog of 800 land claims over the next decade or so and clear out some of the rot in our national fabric.

Will the news head off a planned national day of protest by First Nations people on June 29? Phil Fountaine, the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, was evidently impressed enough to call today a historic day and added that he prefers negotiation to confrontation. Sounds promising.

We’re in a unique period in history. A small minority can extract financial concessions from the national government of a multicultural population that no longer really represents the invading cultures – cultures that alternately conquered or demographically swamped germ-emptied territories of the decimated minority centuries ago.

This sort of legal action is not without precedent, but the opposite situation is far more common even in present day. The Han never bothered to financially compensate nations within China that their own ethnic group swallowed up. The Ainu people of Hokkaido also got nada from the ethnic Japanese. Same goes for Russia’s far eastern native groups. Ditto for the pygmies and other groups that got wiped out by the Bantu in Africa before the European colonization really got going.

But just because everyone else is doing something (or not doing it) doesn’t really make it right.

Land claims treaties on their own won’t be a panacea for the poverty, illiteracy and lack of opportunity that are epidemic for First Nations people living on reserves and to a lesser extent in our big cities – but Natives and non-natives need to get along in this country. The government is right in its new rush to put the land claims behind us so we can focus on the future together.

(The video above shows a traditional Ainu dance outside of a replica of an Ainu home. Interesting parallels to some aspects of North American native culture).

“We don’t like so much the Europeans who came to this place and killed all the people,” an Italian visitor to Vancouver recently remarked to me. He said it while looking at representations of native artwork at the Vancouver Art Gallery with a sincere kind of wonder mixed with a frustrated incomprehension.

According to my acquaintance, Europeans have the idea that their ancestors essentially came over to this part of the world and wiped out the native populations in a terrible explosion of genocidal bloodlust. He actually assumed that the First Nations were extinct in Canada.

I tried my best to explain to the new arrival that while Europeans did indeed commit terrible atrocities against the indigenous population, diseases brought over from Europe had contributed far more to their decline and their current state as a disempowered minority in their own ancestral lands.

Duplicitous diplomats and cheating traders didn’t bring these cultures to their knees. Typhoid, Tuberculosis and smallpox ensured that the European colonial experience in the Americas would meet little resistance.

Most people living on BC’s west coast are at least somewhat familiar with the history of the Pacific Northwest natives. On the coast, in the midst of plentiful resources and a mild climate all year round, the natives were able to sustain relatively stable societies over more permanent swathes of territory than was possible elsewhere – before contact with Europeans brought its familiar apocalypse.

Unlike their distant cousins to the south who had access to advanced metalworking and stone-hewing technologies, the Pacific Northwest tribes used wood for everything. Hence, no pyramids. No lost cities, like Machu Piccu. Not even a single house remains of their ancient civilization. It has all quite literally rotted away.

Only painstaking work by archeologists, anthropologists and our own First Nations descendants have given us some idea of what went on here long ago.

Mel Gibson’s new film, Apocalypto, will attempt to bridge that gap in our vision a little for the ancient culture of the Mayas, pre-contact. The film must surely suffer from inevitable innacuracies of the worst kind – the ones where there is no living expert who can point out the mistakes. But it at least attempt to show us what this part of the world was like before the coming of the others. I look forward to seeing it – as the first effort of a new genre.