Financial Control Above All Else!
Attawapiskat again in the news. Seems Chief Theresa Spence has become addicted to the limelight. As addicted to being in the news and noticed as she is to the belief residing deep and righteously within her very marrow that it is her divine right as one of the many leaders within the First Nations to receive unlimited funding from various government and allied sources to do with as she will.
Although she and her band council for the Attawapiskat reserve were nominally elected to oversee the fortunes and the fundamental civic-social needs of the people of the reserve to ensure it operates in good order and that everyone's needs are met, her obvious failure is a testament to her lack of capacity and integrity. Yet she claims that it is her right, on behalf of the people she represents, to continue misrepresenting their interests.
She continues to express grave umbrage at the nerve of the federal authorities to appoint a third-party manager, whose work has resulted in the beginning of improvements for the people whose safety and security has been ignored. She chafes at being expected to pay his fee out of funding allocated to the band for this and other purposes, yet the money that somehow trickled through the band council's hands, unaccounted for, and inadequately usefully deployed is no one's business.
She certainly has her supporters who feel aggrieved right alongside her, that Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan is guilty of having made decisions that are inimical, not at all helpful to the fortunes of the reserve. "Legally and morally", claims one of her supporters, Grand Chief Stan Louttit, the third-party manager appointment was "wrong".
As for Chief Spence, she characterizes the imposition of a responsible professional to aid her reserve out of its desperate situation of inadequate housing and hygienic facilities, heating sources and potable water, to the traumatizing experience of the residential school system, where the federal government allied with Church agencies historically removed aboriginal children from their families to school them in the white man's ways, removing them from their culture.
That will certainly resonate with a wide circle of aboriginals for whom this remains a sore point in their history. And it will impinge on the consciousness of the wider Canadian public who were instructed in the fine points of First Nations children suffering at those residential schools where some have declared their experience was useful and worthwhile, while others declare it to have been sheer oppressive torture.
For his part, Minister Duncan stands firm in the face of the verbal onslaught from the First Nations representatives like Chief Spence, pointing out that under the direction of the third-party manager, events are moving forward to correct the unstable and inadequate and downright health-harmful neglect that pertained under the direction of Chief Spence and her council.
Although she and her band council for the Attawapiskat reserve were nominally elected to oversee the fortunes and the fundamental civic-social needs of the people of the reserve to ensure it operates in good order and that everyone's needs are met, her obvious failure is a testament to her lack of capacity and integrity. Yet she claims that it is her right, on behalf of the people she represents, to continue misrepresenting their interests.
She continues to express grave umbrage at the nerve of the federal authorities to appoint a third-party manager, whose work has resulted in the beginning of improvements for the people whose safety and security has been ignored. She chafes at being expected to pay his fee out of funding allocated to the band for this and other purposes, yet the money that somehow trickled through the band council's hands, unaccounted for, and inadequately usefully deployed is no one's business.
She certainly has her supporters who feel aggrieved right alongside her, that Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan is guilty of having made decisions that are inimical, not at all helpful to the fortunes of the reserve. "Legally and morally", claims one of her supporters, Grand Chief Stan Louttit, the third-party manager appointment was "wrong".
As for Chief Spence, she characterizes the imposition of a responsible professional to aid her reserve out of its desperate situation of inadequate housing and hygienic facilities, heating sources and potable water, to the traumatizing experience of the residential school system, where the federal government allied with Church agencies historically removed aboriginal children from their families to school them in the white man's ways, removing them from their culture.
That will certainly resonate with a wide circle of aboriginals for whom this remains a sore point in their history. And it will impinge on the consciousness of the wider Canadian public who were instructed in the fine points of First Nations children suffering at those residential schools where some have declared their experience was useful and worthwhile, while others declare it to have been sheer oppressive torture.
For his part, Minister Duncan stands firm in the face of the verbal onslaught from the First Nations representatives like Chief Spence, pointing out that under the direction of the third-party manager, events are moving forward to correct the unstable and inadequate and downright health-harmful neglect that pertained under the direction of Chief Spence and her council.
posted by Pieface | 7:32 PM
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