Life on First Nations Reserves

There is never any end of problems relating to the isolated geographic status of First Nations reserves. Those reserves which First Nations people are proud of insisting preserve their natural way of life, their heritage.

But there is no longer much that is 'natural' and inherited by custom in that culture for which the practical everyday details of life are no longer practised. Living on the land in isolated First Nations communities has become a habit, one that is weighted with a belief that in so doing, the culture and the history is being prolonged, promoted and honoured.

Understandably, there is love of the land, the natural surroundings, for they are beautiful. On the other hand, there is also the conflict involved with living in a hemisphere whose weather and atmospheric challenges are severe and manifold. Then there is the dreary reality that no one living in those heritage-positioned reserves on treasured ancestral land lives in the manner that their predecessors did; hunting, planting, taking the necessities of life from the land.

What the residents of Indian bands do on those reserves is simply bide time. There is little employment, there are few attempts to make life meaningful apart from the abstract of honouring their ancestors by remaining in the worshipped geography where they abided meaningfully at one time in dim history.

Food is brought into the community; potable water must be water that is treated with modern purification devices. And because of the long distances that food must travel to be shipped in by air or motor vehicle countless times throughout the year, food, or whatever substitututes for food, tends to be very expensive.

The diet of reserve residents no longer resembles the diets of their ancestors, for they no longer make themselves responsible for providing for themselves through hunting and planting, though there is some effort at supplementing in season the foods that are brought in by air or iceroads in the winter months.

First Nations have lost the will and the knowledge and the ability to be resourceful, capable and self-sustaining.

Their homes are those provided for them on the reserve where housing is allocated by band council; their income is funding distributed by the band council and received through a government department whose purpose is to look to their welfare, using public tax dollars to ensure that children are educated and health concerns are looked after.

Having to make no effort to look to their own devices on their own behalf, life becomes meaningless. Ancestor worship cannot and does not fill all those required gaps in human need that activity, satisfaction in providing for oneself and one's children, seeing children grow into healthy, fulfilled individuals to carry on tradition and aspire to make meaning of their lives, all remain absent.

Children in those far-flung communities are abandoned to their own devices, their elders consumed with the need to use alcohol or drugs to achieve a sense of well-being in the absence of any other, normal activities that would bring that emotional sense to them. Children themselves, from sheer boredom and witnessing what elders do, take to sniffing glue.

Dogs' welfare is also ignored, and they are left free to wander the community, to multiply in numbers and forage for themselves, becoming feral and unresponsive to human command in their condition of semi-starvation, and occasionally attacking and harming small children. And now First Nations reserves in the northern regions of Manitoba Ontario and Quebec face a reality of health clinic closures.

Health conditions of the residents of First Nations reserves is far worse than those for comparable communities outside reserves. Convenience foods with poor nutritional value make up the bulk of food consumed, not whole foods; manufactured quasi-food is convenient, and costs less than good quality whole foods, their reliance on salt, fat, sugar tempt, wreaking havoc on human organs.

Diabetes, and the results of long-term diabetes, in nerve damage, eyesight loss, stroke, heart problems, kidney damage and obesity all afflict First Nations reserve residents in far greater numbers than other populations living elsewhere within Canada. Where, though the need is not so great, access to health care facilities is far more accommodating.

"Without adequate service, the nursing stations and hospitals may have to close for periods of time which could result in liability to Canada. As a result, the use of contract relief nursing is urgently required", declares a notice on a government procurement website for Health Canada.

"Nursing stations are the only contact (people on reserves) have for health care. The nurse is the first contact in terms of when people are ill and when there's a health emergency. If you don't have a nurse, I don't know how you manage", commented Ontario Regional Chief Stan Beardy.

But there is a high turnover of nurses. Providing primary health care on isolated reserves is not the first choice of employment for most nurses, unless they are particularly driven by a charitable instinct. And even then, burn-out and a sense of desolation and despair impel many nurses to return to places they are more familiar with, preferring to leave reserves for others to commit to.

And there's the rub; there simply are not sufficient 'others' to commit to spending years of their lives in those isolated, problem-prone reserves. Health Canada reports that the three-year departure rate for nurses working in remote and isolated First Nations communities comes in at 55%.