4 - Friday, September

. 1980 - North Shore News

Bob Hunter

MOST CANADIANS do

¢ strictly personal ®

not visit. Indian reserves.

That’s why f want to make a point of NOT mocking Bifl

Vander Zalm's expressed wish to “live on”

a couple of days.

It would be easy to mock him,
God knows. [fhe thinks he is go-
ing to find out much about lite
on a reserve by staying there a
couple of days as a VIP, forget
it.

Reserves, for the most part are
terrible places. Even the best of
them t call comfortable concen-
tration camps.

The reserve system haunts
Canada — the very name of
which is stolen from the Ottawa
Indians whose word for ‘thome™
was ‘“'Riantata.’*’ ode haunts
Canada in the same way as
Quebee does. That is, it is a
legacy of an old war,

The difference is that the
defeated French rose again from
their cradles and eventually
wrestled half the political power
back from the English victors.

The Indians, rather than
multiplying like rabbits after
their various defeats, were deci-
mated by disease and Famine.

Their culture, rather than win-
ning better-than-equal status in
an eventual continent-wide in-
dependent nation, was for the
most part stamped out by mis-
sionaties and federal agents who
were backed up by so-called
“police’— the RCMP — acting
as conquistadors.

In B.C., native religions were
actually decreed to be illegal!
Elders of the Kwakiut! people
were sent to jail in the 1920s for
acting out the ancient religious
ceremonies of their forefathers,
just as Haida elders have been
locked up in our time for defen-
ding the Queen Charlottes from
ecological rape.

The irony in B.C., of course,
was that the Canadian gov-
ernment had no legal authority
over the native people living on
this side of the Rockies.

There had never been a war,
only ski:mishes. There was
never a victory over the natives as
a race or nation, only bom-
bardments of various villages,
individual murders committed by
various captains, a few
retaliatory strikes by chiefs such
as Maquina.

The big point is that the native
population outnumbered the
white population at the time the
vote was taken to join Con-
federation, and the Indian ma-
jority was never asked to take
part in this ‘‘democratic’’ exer-
cise.

In other words, folks, the
property wasn’t honestly bought
or honestly won in a
strength. It was ripped off by real

ee

Weather:

Mainly cloudy, Friday
with a chance of
showers. Saturday, sunny
with cloudy periods.
Highs near 29° C.

test of

a reserve for

estate sharks inal blatant tand
grab thar omakes | modern-day
apartheid took like a waltz.

Ferdinand Marcos tried to get
away with ao omuch less
outrageous piece of election-rigg-
ing in the Philippines recently --
and look what happened to him!

If there had been international
media AND modern liberal polit-
ical values around back then,
British Columbia would have
some other mame today and it
would NOT be a part of Canada.

It has been the morally-
bankrupt position of every BoC.
government since that initial
fraudulent elecion that our In.
dian land claims question is a
federal, not a provincial respon-
sibility. What legalistic bull!

All the other Indian bands
signed treaties with Canada
“Ours’* didn’t.

The “Indian issue’* in Canad,
and above all, in B.C., ts not zo-
ing to go away any more than the
‘tissue’? of Soweto is going to go
away for the Afrikaners.

It is one thing for Canada’s
spokesmen to shout their fidelity
to political equality for all races
to the ceiling of whatever inter-
national forum that will listen,
but the disgusting fact is that
OUR system of dealing with our
indigenous non-white conquered
peoples obviously does NOT
work, is NOT fair, and cannot be
fixed by tinkering.

And it never will be until a
structural solution is found, like
granting them self-government,
and agreeing on some kind of re-
alistic economic base for them to
stand on. Hey, if £ knew the ex-
act solution I'd sell it for a billion
dollars! The taxpayer would get
his morey back in a year.

Vander Zalm should go visit a
reserve, for sure. If he isn’t ap-
propriately filled with gloom
when he looks at the deep, tangl-
ed roots of the problem, shocked
by the ineptitude of the
bureaucracy that dominates the
lives of natives in Canada, and
horrified by the fact that such
ghettoes should exist at all —
anywhere, never mind in Canada
— then he hasn’t been paying at-
tention.

I hope he does. A British Col-
umbija premier who finally could
relate to the kind of historical
Catch-22 that the natives face
could make a huge difference in
breaking the deadlock between
Ottawa and Victoria that keeps
the Indians trapped between a
hard place and nowhere.

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Retirement condos approved

From Page 3

the farm, which was a daity
operation following the First
World War until the carly 1950s,
was purchased in L981 for S188
millon by Harttord Holdings Ltd.

But the company's plans to turn
the property into a 32-unit
townhouse development ran into a
combined financial mire of North
Vancouver City community plan

doning restrictions, interest rates of

22 per cent and declining realty
Prices.

At the time, zoning restricted
building on the site to a maximum
of 32 units. The restriction made
Hartford's proposed development
financially impractical.

Hartford's application to in-
crease density on the property to
60 units was turned down,

The Canadian Imperial Bank
took over possession of the Stoker
property in June, 1984,

In 1958, the Stoker property was
zoned for apartments, but that
zoning was changed after the
Stoker family applied to have it
rezoned to single family residential
because of the prohibitive taxes
levied on the high-density zoned
property.

The Stoker family
owned seven acres,
The main farm house was built
around 1906. It was torn down in
Dec. 1982.

originally

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