4 - Wednesday, March 25, 1987 -

Narih Shere News

Bob Hunter

@ strictly personal ®

THE FIRST Indian I got
to know was a purebred
Huron who saved my life
one winter night in a forest
near Kenora, Ontario.

I was about to freeze to death
when he came along and showed
me how to stay alive in sub-zero
temperatures.

It wasn't the most comfortable
means of survival. | had to make
a huge bonfire on top of the solid
tock of the Canadian Shield.
When the fire had finally burned
down, I laid my siceping bag in
the ashes and soaked up the heat
retained in the rock for the rest
of the night.

From there, my education
about the bleak realities facing
native people proceeded through
my days as a police reporter
covering Winnipeg's North End
and venturing later through Van-
couver’s Skid Road with the
Beothuck Patrol, a Black Pan-
ther-style Sixties radical Indian
group.

It slowly dawned on me that
Canada is a land where a soft
apartheid system is locked firmly
in place, allowing hundreds of
little Sowetos to fester across the
Truce North.

As a journalist | have visited a
lot of reserves, where I
discovered the poverty and

Beer confiscated

WEST VANCOUVER Police con-
fiscated 11 cases of beer from 15
Cypress Bowl visitors over the
weekend.

A police spokesman said the
largest amount of liquor seized

from one person was three cases of
beer.

He said no charges were laid
because there was no evidence of
drinking in public places.

Personal Injury

Ardagh

Hunter

Turner

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#300-1401 Lonsdale Ave., North Vancouver

986-4366

Free Initial Consultation

suicidal alcoholism, but could
not discover the reasons why un-
ul oT finally realized what) the
long-term effects oof cultural
segregation and enforced
dependency amounted to.

} have travelled extensively
through the Northwest Ter-
ritorics, where the naked colo-
nialism of Ottawa's cule over the
Indians, Eskimos and Inuit really
hits home. Ottawa controls
everything — the air, the water,
the land, what's underneath the
land.

In some ways, our system is
more nefarious than other openly
totalitarian states, because it pre-
tends to deliver freedom, Yet the
reserves are little more than com-
fortable concentration camps,
kept passive by red tape and
handouts. By comparison, South
Africa’s notorious apartheid
system is a clumsy thing.
Canada's is sophisticated,
sneaky.

The history of South Africa
and the history of Canada and
their mutual relationships with
indigenous populations were ex-
actly parallel up untii recent
times, when the South African

= ATEMAN:

made the mistake of giving apar-
theid a name.

Canada wisely left the British.
imposed imperial system of con-
trolling the natives in place, and
called it ‘tenfranchisement."

Canadians who have clung to
their Indian status live in a dif-
ferent country than the rest of us.

Not only are they subject to all
the laws we are subject to, they
must bend all over again to
another Byzantine set of rules
formulated by Indian Affairs
mandarins and enforced, as ever.
by the Mounties, whose main
task is still to keep the Indians
subdued.

The nadir as tndian culture in
Canada had been reached by the
end of the last century. By then,
natives’ bodies were actually
shrunken from chronic malnutri-
tion and the effects of the
smallpox and measles plagues.

All of this touches us directly
because, as many readers will be
aware, British Columbians
entered Confederation
fraudulently. Only a fraction of
the B.C. population was non-
Indian at the time of the vote,
and the Indians were, of course,

not asked for their opinion,

Thus the jurisdictional stand-
eff in B.C. over Indian Land
claims. The Indians, you see, are
tight. [ egally, they do own B.C.!

It can be shown, genetically,
by the way, that nearly half of all
Canadians have at least some In-
dian blood in them. For openers,
almost everyone in Quebee has to
be classified as mixed blood. The
reason is simple enough — the
original French colonists were
mostly men and they married
native women.

As I see it, the case for Indian
self-government cannot be made
foo strongly. Without some such
constitutional guarantee to the
natives, the mosaic of Canadian
justice can only be described as
having a hole in its middle.

If we cannot free the Indians,
we will never be truly free
ourselves. The Indians have the
vote, certainly. But they are not
free in the way that you and | are
free. They don't have the same
support system and they start off
handicapped in a host of little
ways, the net effect of which is to
hold them down.

Let's change it!

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