Foster … Truth, reconciliation and resources.
Does this week’s voluminous executive summary of a report-in-progress from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) point to a “way forward” for indigenous people, or merely stoke grievance, that most potentially self-destructive of political weapons? Nobody would deny the wrongs of residential schools, but according to Wab Kinew, associate vice-president of indigenous affairs at the University of Winnipeg, and an “honorary witness” to the TRC, failure to pursue the TRC’s elaborate laundry list of 94 recommendations would lead to “more uncertainty for the resource industry.” That sounds like a threat. But who is being threatened if not his own people, for many of whom resource development offers the best hope for regaining self reliance and respect?
The use of the term “cultural genocide” by the report’s authors and many sympathetic observers is inflammatory. Indeed, analogies to the Final Solution are likely to provoke distaste rather than sympathy among that vast majority of Canadians who had nothing to do with this aspect of Canadian history which, we might remember, was the retrospectively shameful norm, not the exception, in the colonial era.
What was involved in the residential schools was not genocide, it was well-intended “acculturation” to the very different kinds of knowledge and skills necessary to thrive in a fast-evolving modern society. Many aboriginal parents were eager for their children to have such education. Its residential form was dictated by small, often extremely remote, communities and nomadic lifestyles.
The fact that it came attached to replacing one set of “spiritual” values — which were in no way “inferior” — with another is indeed reprehensible. And there is obviously no excuse for sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church (The TRC wants an apology from the Pope. They may well get one, but, ironically, by climbing aboard the climate change bandwagon, the Catholic Church remains a threat to aboriginal people, since climate hysteria is behind much anti-development agitation).
The eagerness of some influential figures to reach for the sackcloth and ashes may prove less than helpful, because it offers ammunition to anti-development forces outside the
Fort McKay is an example of a native community that has embraced the opportunities of resource development
aboriginal community. Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau rushed to accept the report’s recommendations, obviously without reading them.
Insofar as many aboriginal communities today are genuinely “in crisis,” the roots lay as much in continuing to live in remote reservations with abysmal facilities, poor educational opportunities, few jobs, and sometimes incompetent and corrupt leadership, as with the legacy of residential schools.
One priority must be not to make things worse in a misguided attempt to make them better (the original sin of residential schools). Last year’s Supreme Court decision on aboriginal land title in the case of the Tsilhqot’in Nation in B.C. was sold as strengthening requirements for consultation. This seems an admirable measure, but in fact, creates uncertainty, not least by greatly extending lands under possible dispute. The ruling declared that it did not give native people a veto, but it opens the possibility of endless court wrangling.
Consultation is indeed essential. The danger is that by trying to make reparation for past sins by granting additional powers to challenge development, the decision may have compensated for alleged cultural genocide by handing natives the weapons of economic suicide.
In mid-May, the Lax Kw’alaams band of Northern B.C. voted at a series of public meetings (attended by only a small minority of the band) to reject a billion-dollar payout over 40 years to approve the $36-billion Pacific NorthWest LNG project. As I noted in a recent column, if the Lax Kw’alaams were holding out for a better deal, they may have made a mistake. That was confirmed this week in the International Energy Agency’s dimming outlook for Canadian LNG development.
An example of a community that has embraced the opportunities of resource development is Fort McKay, which sits in the middle of the oilsands. Under chief Jim Boucher, it has developed thriving local businesses to serve surrounding industry, but Chief Boucher has certainly not been shy in asserting his band’s interests in environmental and other issues.
By contrast, Fort Chipewyan, 220 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, has become the focus of environmental activism and bogus health scares which have created enormous anxiety among its people. Fort Chip has been the favourite site for photo ops with Hollywood poseurs and junk scientists. However, when Neil Young came last year to condemn the oilsands, Fort Chip chief Alan Adam inconveniently noted that the oilsands were “economically critical” to his community.
The ultimate problem remains the one with which the residential schools attempted to deal: that of bringing ancient tribal cultures into the modern world. Cultural sensitivity is of course important, but it is patronizing delusion to celebrate “traditional knowledge” as if it were merely “different but equal” to physics, chemistry, engineering or modern medicine. It is in such disciplines that young native people need to be trained for a brighter future.
Little will it be achieved by continuing to cultivate and wallow in resentments over past wrongs which nobody denies, but which are in some cases being used against the long-term interests of native people.