ORIGINAL SIN

Premiers vow to end aboriginal poverty (Judy Monchuk, Canadian Press, August 11th, 2005)

Canada's premiers agreed Tuesday to support a 10-year plan that aims to eliminate aboriginal poverty and right historic wrongs.

"The gap that exists between aboriginal Canadians, First Nations and the general public is something we should all be ashamed of," B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell said Tuesday after the premiers met with aboriginal leaders. Campbell, who will help draft the agenda for a first ministers meeting on native issues in the fall, said the changes will not come overnight.

"That plan should be created by the aboriginal leadership to lay out a plan for us that we can commit to and act on," he said. "The federal government will have to be part of that solution as provinces are already."

Native leaders wanted the leaders of the provinces and territories to support the ambitious plan, which was presented to Ottawa in June. It will address health care, housing, economic development and forging a new relationship between Canada's aboriginal peoples and the different levels of government. [...]

Living conditions in Canada's aboriginal communities ranked 63rd in a recent United Nations report, while Canada overall ranked third.

It is folly to believe this will make any big difference, but perhaps that isn’t the point. Since the earliest colonists, every generation of North Americans has confronted the embarrassing presence of aboriginal peoples and sought to “solve” their plight and reconcile the culturally irreconcilable. Just about everything–-genocide, banishment, conversion, reservations, land-claims, modern education, cradle to grave security, cultural promotion and celebration, apology and contrition, affirmative action, resource-sharing, self-government and oodles and oodles of cash–-has been tried, and still a large majority live amidst a defiant poverty and social pathology. Even those communities that win the lottery through resources or gambling succumb with depressing frequency to crime and corruption.

In 2005, no serious person can believe social progress and personal advancement are possible without an ethic of optimism, individual self-reliance and personal responsibility for one’s fate and one’s family. The same is true of any community serious about pulling itself out of alcoholism, family dysfunction, violence and despair. That these impulses are not part of traditional aboriginal world views is only part of the problem–-they’re not prominent in Far Eastern traditions either. What is mind-boggling is the persistent near-unanimity of native peoples in rejecting, at least publically, any acknowledgment of responsibility for improving their lot or moving beyond the painful history of long ago. It is almost as if, rather than seeking a better material life, they share a divine mission to stand as a permanent stark warning of the injustices we risk perpetrating by succumbing to an aggressive and unquestioned conviction of the universal superiority of our beliefs and ways. Just about everything that is glorious in Western civilization appears to have wrecked havoc among indigenous peoples.

And so, decade after decade, we try afresh and tell ourselves that a new policy, a new initiative and (always) more money will square the circle. It would be nice if it did, but surely the real reason we do so is that we need confusing doubt and a fair dose of historical guilt to keep us from succumbing to the impatient contempt we struggle to contain, lest it unleash the barbaric within us anew and result in wrongs and horrors that imperil our souls.