Poking the whale - Aboriginal Racism

Well this may one blog that will come back and bite me in the future, it’s not very PC and I must admit its more working out ideas then firm opinions. For disclosure I must point out at the start that I am a white male born and breed in a small city on the prairies. I grew up in a culture of passive racism, and have a constant struggle to deal with this brain washing. On this last item, I believe I have, for the most part, identified and ignored the effects of this heritage. Now just because I have this history does not negate my opinion; no more than it would for some one who has prejudicial feeling because they have been the subject of racism. So this being said let us begin….
Let me stop here to make something clear. I, as most sensible people, believe that many people thought out the ages have been gravely wronged by others. This happened to the Jews of Europe, the Tibetans of China, and the Negros of the Southern US. That those wrongs must be addressed and redress made. In this particular context previous governments of Canada (and mostly the people they represented) were grievously prejudicial to our aboriginal population. Beyond making personal reparations to individuals who suffered specific abuse as a result of these actions; it is the responsibility of this nation to ensure the culture of this special part of Canada is preserved and promoted. They are we, and we all have the right to be protected by (and occasionally from) the nation.
That being said, I find it both offensive and disturbing that some of those in the aboriginal community are segregationalist, racist and separatists. I say they are segregationalist because there is an attempt to isolate these communities on isolated and insular reserves. I accept that it was the imperialist that created these “homelands” but I find it a curious fact that those who suffered the most from these attempts at isolation have now taken it on as their own and see it as a way to promote there own culture. I am stunned by this because this method, again tried in the negative for generations, has worked so well in the past and why they think it will suddenly work now reminds me of the generals in WWI who thought one more rush of the lines would win the war, it cost them millions of young soldiers and I fear these native segregationalist will cost thousands of young native futures.
Beyond segregationalist there is also, and more offensively, a strong vein of racists in the aboriginal community. This has two forms, one and the less defendable, is the outright belief that aboriginals are better, smarter and more intone with nature than white people. I read something in the local weekly, the Georgia Straight. The article was titled “urban planners need indigenous thinking”. In it a Kamala Todd is stated as arguing, at “At the indigenous City, a public World Urban Forum”, that “aboriginal advice is essential in helping cities transform ecologically”. On the surface this may be taken as a sense of cooperation.
It think it hard to honestly say modern aboriginals have any greater inherent tie to the land than anyone else but because of the fight to regain their cultural identity some have educated them selves more so in ecology than perhaps those who did not have this background. But things often get darker once one moves away from the surface. Later Todd is quoted as saying that with out an aboriginal world-view in planning it is “just more western experts reasserting their control”. Here we see the racism, that western experts (is this all white people or just those in Canada? And what about an Asian view?) are only motivated or capable of domination, that it is the white people (and that is what was meant) who are incapable of ecological sensibility, that we somehow need the paternalistic efforts of the great and wise elders of the aboriginal ‘nation’.
The comment above by Todd shows, perhaps latent or subtle, racism that hold the world view that somehow all white people are evil, imperial and impure; that our only motivation can only be for power or money. That the only pure people, those in touch with the earth, are the aboriginal and that if we could only return to the natural. This is a form of fundamentalism and as such must be identified and countered. This does not mean I think the aboriginal community should not be a part of the planning, they should, as should everyone, equally. This racism coupled with the segregationalist leads to the growing separatist movement among “first nation” peoples.
Unlike the other issues, which with time will fade, the separatist, like those of Quebec, can be the source of great unrest, problems and destruction in the future. Unlike Quebec, the aboriginal lands as spread out, sparsely populated and to dependent of their neighbours. These means that there is a danger that if they push to hard, their may be a backlash against them. The case in Caledonia, where the aboriginal community actively demonstrated their dislike for a legal ruling over land and their claims on them and I am not speaking about the validity of that, I will assume it was valid for the sake of this discussion. They chose to extend their civil disobedience to their neighbours, who were offended by our double standard. In the past, and I am will to concede to a degree today, there has been a legal and political bias against natives. Because of our collective guilt over this disgraceful past; we have inverted our political bias and now allow crimes to be committed by natives that would not be tolerated if the perpetrators were white, or any other ethnicity for that matter. This immunity to civil law, come the shouts for self-government. Now each community should have the right to govern itself in the larger context of region, province and nation but aboriginal self-government is a racial one; one defined not by community but by race, and as such is offensive to ever developing sense of multiculturalism in Canada.
There is a limit to our collective guilt and Caledonia showed that this limit is approaching. We, as a nation, are more than willing to support, help and protect members of our community, cultural patches on our national quilt. But if you are not, or do not wish to be, part of our nation, that makes you them, something that is in competition with Canada, something dangerous and poisonous. If the aboriginal community allows itself to be dragged along this path there will come a day where the people of Canada will stay no, and our quilt may turn to rage. The reason those in our past were able to do the things they did is because the aboriginal community was sparse and isolated. Today’s communities suffers this plus a dependence on the nation that totally surround them. Radical native terrorist have lived under the false belief that their gains have been made due to the strength of their position, were in reality it has been “gifted” to them (granted with much effort and education) by the more populous majority. When the day comes, and it could be sooner than they think (what if native activism gets painted with the brush of international terrorism, some small group contacts Al Qaeda, where will the aboriginal community be then?); when the multicultural whale will swamp the aboriginal community and eat it alive, and at that point the smaller will be gone and the other irrevocable diminished.