Timothy B Tyson said: “If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.”
Kids are taught in schools about native history, they make cards and drawings about it. Once they grow up, they hardly encounter any natives in their work places or lives.
Every government talks about reconciliation with Canadian native population. Government after government, like a clockwork. It never gets done though, otherwise they won’t keep promising it. I doubt if an average Canadian understands what’s the issue here. I doubt even the governments understand, let alone to solve it.
Let me analyze with my simplistic knowledge about it. Europeans invaded Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Europeans had superior weapons and military organization. So they were successful in occupying. In rest of the world in the history, in this kind of scenario, occupiers just take over everything. Sometimes, occupied regroup, fight, and take it back. In Canada’s and the other three countries’ case, the land was so much, and population so sparse, that both parties continued living on the same land separately. Only thing happened is that natives were pushed to interiors of the land. Treaties were signed and broken. Attempts were made to assimilate natives with occupiers via resident schools etc. All they did was leave deep scars.
Fast forward to the present day Canada, natives mainly live in small towns and villages. They provide some of their own services like schools and perhaps partly hospitals, while a whole lot of services are provided by the mainstream government like water, electricity, gas. I don’t know how it will look like in 50 years or 100 years. But the model does not look sustainable.
One possibility is that natives live completely independent, nothing to do with the rest of the Canada. Is it even possible? The other possibility is that they are given alternative lands in city and Canada becomes one nation. Not that it will be acceptable to natives, but I believe Canadian government will bring in a whole lot of immigrants to inhabit native lands and we will lose the nature that natives have preserved for so long.
I think the crux of the problem is that native population is a little less than 5%, the other 95% people constitute Canadian Government. So the government can’t be forced to give a generous deal to natives. But at the same time, being woke, government has to look like they are working on it. So they make woke statements. But nothing ever gets done. Just the charade continues. So, in the end, I would welcome other people’s ideas, especially who have more in-depth knowledge. All I know is that after all these decades, some natives don’t even have access to clean drinking water.
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