Matt Gurney: Natives big losers as ex-chief tells Iranians about Canadian ‘concentration camps’ on reserves

Matt Gurney | Oct 17, 2012 5:26 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 17, 2012 9:51 AM ET

Screengrab from PresssTVTerry Nelson on Iranian television.

 

Friends, I have a double dose of bad news for you. There’s no easy way to say it. So here it is. Not only is Canada set on exterminating a whole segment of its population. That would be bad enough. It also turns out that we frankly aren’t very good at it.

These painful revelations come to us from Tehran courtesy of Terry Nelson, formerly chief of the Roseau River Anishinabe nation south of Winnipeg, and Dennis Pashe, of the Dakota Tipi nation. Both men have plenty of time to travel these days, having both lost their jobs as chiefs. Nelson lost his after his own band council gave him the boot, for the third time, last fall. Pashe was fired by Ottawa in 2003, after the federal government sent in a third-party manager in the face of corruption allegations and violence on his reserve, compounded by Pashe’s refusal to call elections.

None of this bothers the Iranian regime, of course. They were pleased to host both gentlemen in Tehran, knowing that they could be counted on to spew anti-Canadian rhetoric. They didn’t disappoint.

Appearing on regime-sponsored English-language PressTV, Nelson claimed that 600 missing aboriginal women are proof Canada doesn’t care about natives. Ditto the disproportionate number of natives in Canadian prisons. According to media reports, he called native reserves “concentration camps,” and claimed that every barrel of Canadian oil had been stolen from natives, as it was their land first. (Apparently, Nelson considers Newfoundland’s coasts to also be native land.)

There’s nothing new about a couple of bozos travelling abroad to criticize their country. This isn’t even Nelson’s first such trip

But it was Pashe who stole the show, telling the attentive Iranian host that it was all “part of the ongoing Canadian government effort to exterminate us.”

How is that effort going, you might ask? According to StatsCan, Canada’s native population is growing steadily, and is expected to rise from 1,172,790 in 2006 to more than two million in 2031.
There’s nothing new about a couple of bozos travelling abroad to criticize their country. This isn’t even Nelson’s first such trip; he travelled to Iraq in 1998 on a “fact-finding mission” into the effect of sanctions on the Iraqi people. Nor is this the first time that Iran has attacked Canada’s human rights record, or given bozos prominent coverage. Remember the American Jews President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posed for pictures with in Tehran at the 2006 Holocaust denial conference, for example?

But ignore Tehran’s pathetic attempts to portray Canada as worse than Iran (or ask some of the protesters gunned down, raped or tortured during the post-2009 election protests what they think about the two nations’ comparative human rights records). The truly sad thing about Nelson and Pashe’s trip is that there are, indeed, systemic issues facing Canada’s native population, and Nelson and Pashe have made a mockery of them.

Nelson isn’t wrong to point out that many native women are missing. Or that natives are overrepresented in the prison population. Or even to point out that many resource extraction projects, including petroleum sites, are on or near native reserves. And many Canadians, native and otherwise, agree that many reserves are essentially designed to fail, and that the living conditions for natives there are unacceptable. These are all fair things to say.

But by travelling to Iran, and slamming Canada in overheated rhetoric to an enemy regime, these two men have done nothing to help their cause, and indeed, have made Canadians less likely to listen the next time they hear reports of natives in need.

It isn’t necessarily the worst thing Nelson did during his time in Tehran: He reportedly discussed Canadian oil infrastructure with Iranian officials, including pipelines that feed the U.S. market. Iran, which has boasted before of its intention to hit Western targets through asymmetrical means if attacked by the U.S. or Israel, was undoubtedly interested. But one doesn’t have to assign traitorous motives to Nelson to believe his trip hurt the interests of his people. Not just Canadians, but native Canadians, specifically.

National Post