Lack of progress on reconciliation frustrating

I have to respond to your editorial last week where you suggest that folks who are feeling frustrated with the slow pace and lack of results in the reconciliation process with Indigenous people in Canada are “historically illiterate, culturally entitled white people.”

If there is historical ignorance about this issue it is because the education system and the media have failed to communicate the issues properly. We are all the calls fake news.

senior was prime minister, if I recall correctly, Jean Chrétien was minister of Indian affairs and they were going to revamp the Indian Act and fix all the problems. The document initially tabled in the House was, unfortunately, called a White Paper. If anyone in the public studied the document (I’m sure very few did) it would have been a waste of time because as near as I can figure nothing got fixed.

Fast forward to the early 1990s. If I have my history right, Mike treaty process after a couple of court rulings clearly established that Indigenous rights had not been extinguished, particularly in the south tip of Vancouver Island.

The land claims identified by the various bands were overlapping and consequently word spread that they were claiming 150 per cent of the province and there were fears that private properties were in jeopardy. In addition there was some confusion about the difference between “rights” and “title.”

Around that time the Nisga’a signed a landmark agreement outside this treaty process and, since I haven’t heard a lot about the successes or failures of that agreement, I presume it’s working OK.

After 10 years of spending millions of dollars on meetings and negotiations almost nothing was accomplished. The government took their turn for another decade of futility until recently the whole process was scrapped.

It was almost as if no one wanted to settle anything, like it was a patronage appointment for old political hacks.

The treaty commission published regular reports and I got on the mailing list and tried to keep up with what they were doing but it was a frustrating read and I finally gave up.

Recently there was a vote by a local band to sign a treaty and it was turned down. I don’t believe it was clearly stated in the local paper why the band members turned it down. I remember reading that they would remain under the Indian Act whatever that means.

We’ve seen so many things on the news about the atrocious conditions on reserves from a lack of clean drinking water to inadequate housing, drug and alcohol abuse and teenage suicide. I believe most Canadians want these problems fixed. However, we rely on government and other social activists to fix them. What we’ve observed is a history of failure and all at huge cost to the taxpayers.

I think it should be noted for the historical record that the colonial conquest of Canada (indeed all of the Americas) was done primarily for and by the political, social and economic elite of the day. Canada was a democracy of sorts but ordinary citizens had no real say in the way the railroads like Grand Trunk pushed Indigenous peoples off their land and then cheated them out of promised compensation as recently reported in The Citizen.

Ordinary people did not have a say in the policy that resulted in the residential school system. That was a product of church and state collusion.

Prior to the advent of legislated labour standards and workers’ rights to organize unions, ordinary working people were badly exploited themselves by these very same social and economic elites. They did not have time to ponder the social consequences of the economic exploitation of Indigenous people. Many people in those days could not read nor write.

Since the elder Trudeau’s time we have negotiated the FTA then NAFTA and more recently TPP. We’ve become a bilingual nation and a cultural mosaic. We’ve repatriated our Constitution and established the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We’ve survived sovereignty but we can’t seem to resolve the plight of Indigenous peoples. In that same time the vast bulk of the wealth taken in Canada has accumulated into the hands of one per cent of the “culturally entitled white people.”

If the “sins of the fathers need to be visited upon the sons” (please forgive my gender insensitivity here) then the descendants of those who profited most (the one per cent) should apologize and make restitution.

With almost no tangible results from past endeavours it’s easy to see why people do not see value in spending millions of their hard earned tax dollars conducting meetings, negotiations and hearings or renaming parks.

Roy Olsen Prince George

What we’ve observed is a history of failure and all at huge cost to the taxpayers.