native pride

It's no secret that relations between Canada's aboriginal peoples and, well, everyone else are a little tense these days. Actually, come to think of it, they have been for a long time.

The earliest memory I have of a native person was seeing a dark-skinned man with long black hair and a studded leather jacket. To look at him, even though I was only five or six, I knew that that man was an Indian. Seeing him in a coffee shop somewhere in Alberta in the mid '80s filled me with enough fascination and fear that I still, to this day, remember the utter need to understand what I was seeing and the anxiety surrounding being seen by him. That's not to say that I had never met a native person before that or met many since who had an entirely different affect on me.

There aren't many aboriginal people in KW. Relatively speaking, of course. Not far from where I work there is an Aboriginal Resource Centre. About equal distance in the other direction is a Six Nations' flag hung in an apartment window that you can see from the sidewalk on King Street if you're walking north. Whenever I'm near I make a point to look for the flag, just to make sure it's still there. I think the flag has the same affect on me as the man in the leather jacket.

So, there is a native community here: at least, I've seen the signs of one. But what kind of community is it? Frankly, I don't know, but I'm going to look into it. What I do know is that Canadians at large really hate native people. I don't know how else to put it: Canadians, in their actions and their words, betray a real dislike for native persons and what they represent.

Now I don't want anyone think that a native person, or native people are living symbols. That's kind of the problem, actually. That's why the man in a leather jacket (who, honestly, may have just been a really tanned biker) exists in my memory and for years was what I thought Indians were like... all of them. Reducing a culture or an ethnic group (there are several aboriginal ethnic groups) to a symbol or a type is racism. Yup, I'm racist. There I said it. But I'm trying to get over it and I think acknowledging it is important. If you haven't yet, you should try it (and if you think you aren't, you're pretty naive).

People with aboriginal ancestry are just people: modern, troubled, each with their own destiny, just like anybody else. But just like everybody else, they're also different from everyone else. One thing that makes them different is the last 400 years of interaction with Europeans. Oh, by the way, that's most of us: I'm second generation Canadian of British descent (that's ethnicity), for example, and that makes my cultural heritage European. In those four centuries aboriginal Canadians adapted to a lot of changes.

It wasn't until about the last 150 that things got really tense because more and more Europeans (and, more recently, immigrants from elsewhere) began coming to Canada and settling in large numbers and using the land in a way it hadn't been used previously. Naturally the people who had been living here weren't huge fans (nobody likes change) and they either resisted, assimilated, or stayed away. Well, there's no staying away anymore and assimilation means giving up significant parts of your heritage (like if I told you that if you really wanted to be a Canadian you'd have to fork over your house, your language, your name, and say goodbye to your family forever), and resistence has never been terribly effective against the might of European firepower or the elegance of Canadian legislation.

So, I'm not terribly surprised that Native communities are taking stands on their reservation lands (or the adjascent disputed areas) in places like Caledonia or Akwesasne. What surprises me is the perpetual dragging-of-feet that is the response to these issues by virtually all levels of government. Equally surprising is the attitude of the public who sees these issues as an us-versus-them scenario. Well, surprising isn't really the word that best describes it. Disappointing maybe.

The issue is a deep one and not likely to be sorted out anytime soon. I think people realize this and that's what the frustration is all about. Nobody has the patience (well, we whities don't at any rate) to really figure this thing out. It's been 400 years in the making, if I told it would take 400 more would you want to be the one to deal with it? No. Of course not. We don't function on timelines that long. Some of us can't plan what to do later today. And there's no real need because the status quo is fine for the vast majority of us. But for people whose grandparents hunted for sustainance and lived with no master but themselves, living in a trailer on reserve off government handouts... well, that's murder on your self-esteem.

So, I think what we all need is a dose of Native Pride. It's kind of nervy to even ask, but maybe if we better understood the position of Canada's aboriginal people we'd be able to arrange something that was more mutually beneficial and adaptable to the changing world we live in. Of course, that would mean we'd have to actually listen our Native community members and not just gawk at them from across the restaurant.