Brilliant analysis of our present situation. Historically we often use the Holocaust, Hitler's Final Solution, as a reference point for genocide but less so, the manufactured famines, ethnic purges and outright slaughter perpetrated by Stalin, who targeted entire races for expulsion and extinction (Kazakhs, Poles, etc. etc.). Indeed, the number of Stalin's victims is staggering, more than double that of Hitler's six million Jews. The Chinese state 's oppression of the Uyghurs is within that Stalinist tradition and is deserving of the term 'genocidal'.
Great article. One of our biggest flaws as a country is when we fail to live up to the ideals we say we support.
If non-Native Canadians are fed up with Native peoples' protests and complaints, they should try to imagine how fed up the Natives are at having to repeat the same message over and over again. If you look at everything from the Treaties to Harold Cardinal's 1969 book "The Unjust Society" through to the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to Arthur Manuel and Ron Derrickson's 2017 book "The Reconciliation Manifesto", there's been a remarkable continuity in the kinds of arrangements a lot of Native people have advocated for.
The details vary depending on who exactly you talk to or read, but the overarching message-that they have no problem living alongside the rest of us, or even as considering themselves Canadians in many cases, but they don't want to simply be assimilated into non-Native society. The whole reason there's so much alcoholism, dysfunction and violence is because we've been trying the same assimilation approach for nearly 200 years, and it's been a massive failure.
Maybe it's time we actually started listening to what some of these Native thinkers and activists have been saying for a century and more. That doesn't mean accepting everything everyone says uncritically or not asking questions (how do we power transportation to and from outlying communities without oil and gas?) but it might just be a way forward.
Who knows, it might actually reduce the number of protests and blockades.
Accuracy in language is important, I agree. "deliberate intent to decimate or totally exterminate an ethnic population." To decimate means to reduce by one tenth. To exterminate means to remove all. The difference is 90%.
Brilliant analysis of our present situation. Historically we often use the Holocaust, Hitler's Final Solution, as a reference point for genocide but less so, the manufactured famines, ethnic purges and outright slaughter perpetrated by Stalin, who targeted entire races for expulsion and extinction (Kazakhs, Poles, etc. etc.). Indeed, the number of Stalin's victims is staggering, more than double that of Hitler's six million Jews. The Chinese state 's oppression of the Uyghurs is within that Stalinist tradition and is deserving of the term 'genocidal'.
Great article. One of our biggest flaws as a country is when we fail to live up to the ideals we say we support.
If non-Native Canadians are fed up with Native peoples' protests and complaints, they should try to imagine how fed up the Natives are at having to repeat the same message over and over again. If you look at everything from the Treaties to Harold Cardinal's 1969 book "The Unjust Society" through to the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples to Arthur Manuel and Ron Derrickson's 2017 book "The Reconciliation Manifesto", there's been a remarkable continuity in the kinds of arrangements a lot of Native people have advocated for.
The details vary depending on who exactly you talk to or read, but the overarching message-that they have no problem living alongside the rest of us, or even as considering themselves Canadians in many cases, but they don't want to simply be assimilated into non-Native society. The whole reason there's so much alcoholism, dysfunction and violence is because we've been trying the same assimilation approach for nearly 200 years, and it's been a massive failure.
Maybe it's time we actually started listening to what some of these Native thinkers and activists have been saying for a century and more. That doesn't mean accepting everything everyone says uncritically or not asking questions (how do we power transportation to and from outlying communities without oil and gas?) but it might just be a way forward.
Who knows, it might actually reduce the number of protests and blockades.
Accuracy in language is important, I agree. "deliberate intent to decimate or totally exterminate an ethnic population." To decimate means to reduce by one tenth. To exterminate means to remove all. The difference is 90%.
Guilt is always a major component of any faith, and this is a faith like any other, atoning for the sins of the father.
It was all a lot easier when the closest the Canadian left had to a common faith was faith in public healthcare.
Garbage