The Heritage Past

It is really hard to believe that aboriginals cling so determinedly to the past, to their heritage, to their love of the land, that they choose to live in isolated, inaccessible communities. Their separation from the opportunity to advance culturally and socially and materially as a nation apart from the greater social conformity is a puzzle that can be unravelled only by themselves.

It is their huge ancestral respect for their history, their storied past, that has them clinging to the territory they claim to know best, that resonates with the ways of their forebears, that has true meaning to them and value far exceeding anything that modernity might compensate them with should they move elsewhere and become consumed by the larger culture.

Yet they do not live as they did in the past. The hunter-gatherer society that once expressed a way of life for aboriginal Canadians is no longer feasible, nor even truly sought out by native Canadians. They have, in its stead, become willing and unhappy dependents of the state. It is puzzling in the extreme to determine where the value is for them in living on handouts.

Gainful employment is not possible in isolated communities, other than as employees of the band council. Those opportunities are acutely finite. There is a breakdown of community within the community as crime escalates, alcohol dependency is endemic, drug dealing steals pride, children are neglected, and violence is visited upon the unfortunate among them, while predators stalk women.

Huge installments of federal and provincial tax funding is expended on a continual basis for housing, education, medical attention, but it is absorbed and none of what it pays for appears to come close to representing the needs of an indigent, listless and values-lost society. Band chiefs and councillors grant themselves handsome remuneration for overseeing the reserve's business.

Yet they fail to take action that is needed to ensure a modicum of social normalcy, too busy entitling themselves to a majority share of the funding that comes into the community while neglecting the primary needs of that same community. As for the community itself, living on the avails of what amounts to charity, having no obligation to work, or to expend any energy in normal home maintenance, everything rots around them.

Children who are not well fed and taught discipline and respect for themselves and for others, are also not taught the necessity of attending school, of extending themselves to become educated, to have ambitions for higher education. They are left to their own devices by absent parents, alcoholic or drugged care-givers, and life has little meaning and quality for them.

But the Chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations decry the paternalistic oversight of the federal and provincial governments and the funding emanating from those sources as inadequate and the programs insubstantial to the purpose required. While insisting that life on reserves is a requisite for the pride and honour of those whom they serve.

And various levels of government institutions and the executive branches of government feel trapped in a system meant to serve the needs of these dependent and frail communities, whose failure remains a living rebuke to us all.