@ — Sunday, September 6, 1992 - North Shore News

A bright light in the constitutional gloom

ET WAS Gandhi who said that the measure of a nation’s
soul is how well it treats its minorities. If that is indeed
true, Canada has not displayed much of a soul so far.

Oh, we make a great game out
of multiculturalism, and we kave
placed cur French-speaking mi-
nority on such a pedestal that for
24 of the pasi 25 years, we have
had prime ministers who came
from Quebec. ,

The treatment of the native mi-
nority in Canada has been a dif-
ferent story.

This is, after all, a country that
began its journey to modern
statehood by an act of genocide
against the Beothuks and by at-
tempting to exterminate the Mic-
macs.

Since no one has been able to
calculate the population of North
America at the time of the Euro-
pean invasions, no absolute figure
for the death rate among the
natives is possible.

Estimates of the total number
of natives in the year 1500 range
from 3.5 million to as many as 9.5
million.

Traditionally, pre-coatact
estimates have been low, bui in
recent years scholars have tended
to keep raising the figure.

The higher the instial figure, the
worse the disaster. We know
beyond a shadow of a doubt that
the first five generations of con-
tact between native North Ameri-
éans and Europeans amounted to
a genuine holocaust.

By the time the pancemics of
chicken pox, mumps, measles,
rubella, smallpox, influenza and
possibly bubonic plague had run
their course, and the guns and
swords of early English death-
squads turned locse in pursuit of
“‘savages’’ had done their awful
work, fully 90% of the Indians
were wiped out.

By the middle of the 18th cen-
tury, there were only a few thou-
sand of the once-numerous and
prosperous Hurens and Iroquois
left alive.

- The survivors found thenselves
living in villages that were largely
uninhabited. There were more ©
canoes than they needed.

Lodges thai had been full of
laughter were full of echoes.
Weeds had grown up in untended

Bob
Hunter

STRICTLY PERSONAL

Along the West Coast the story
was the same. At Neah Bay,
witnesses reported that the beach
for a distance of eight miles was
literally strewn with the dead
bodies of Kwakiutl smalipox vic-
tims,

On the Plains, the Cree,
Blackfoot, Assiniboine, Saulteaux
and Gros Ventres were broken by
sneak attacks on villages, deliber-
ate starvation and a program of
environmental destruction.

But perhaps the worst aspect of
all was that the moment Canadian
authorities had the upper hand
militarily, they unhesitatingly
turned the new Dominion into an
archipelago of some 600-odd con-
centration camps (nicely called
““reserves’’), with starving pris-
oners watched over by soldiers
and bureaucrats.

By 1876, the Indian Act —
nowhere mentioned when treaties
were being negotiated —- had
become the instrument of Ot-
tawa’s supreme rule, and it dic-
tated, from that day on, virtually
every aspect of an Indian's life,
from birth to grave.

Since thea, native people in
Canada have had to endure
various attempts to stamp out"
their languages, religions and
cultures; they have had their
children kidnapped en masse and
taken off to residential schools

&4 Estimates of natives in the year
1500 range from 3.5 million to as
many as 9.8 million. 99

where, it turns out, many if not
most of them were sexually abus-
ed by perverts calling thernselves
priests; and they have been
thrown into prisons, beaten by
police, and spat upon by their
white conquerors.

During the years I was resear-
ching a book called Occupied
Canada, a rewriting of our na-
tional story from the native point
of view, 1 became thoroughly
depressed and disgusted by this
country’s real but hidden history
as a neo-colonial empire in its
own right.

Having said all this, I must add
that | think the aboriginal self-
government prcposal in the new
constitutional package is a
magnificent step forward. :

You can’t go back and change
history, but you can go forward
and change the future.

As my friend Ron George of
Smithers, president of the Native
Council of Canada and one of the
key architects of the new deai puts
it, native people and other Cana-
dians now have a chance ‘‘to be
partners in history, instead of ad-
versaries."'

There is much about the new
proposed constitution that stinks,
in my mind.

The guarantee of 25% of the
seats in the Comiaons for Quebec
disenfranchises future British
Columbians probably more than
anybody else, and it throws the
already-tattered concept of repre-
sentation by population out the
window.

It also perpetuates senatorial
patronage in Quebec, even if it
does manage to eliminate it in the
rest of the country.

As we drift toward Oct. 26 and
the national referendum on the

Constitution, there is plenty to

argue about. ~

But, on balance, my sense at
the moment is that there is the
one slowing gem in the whole
soiled constitutional bundle, and it
is Canada’s belated but quite
valiant attempt to lift the yoke of
oppression from the shoulders of
the native peopie, giving them .
room to stand on their own two
feet.

if the constitutional package

flies, Canada will not just have
saved its own butt from
baikanization, it will have done
something a lot more stirring. It
will actually have begun the long
job of redceming itself from its
colonial past and neo-colonial ©
present.

Redemption may not be
everybody’s main concern in con-
sidering the package. But issues
ike liberty, equaiity and justice
can’t be ignored.

To date, while we may have
created one of the most free and
egalitarian nations in the world
jor the majority of our citizens,
we have coatinued to trample all
over the rights of the pecple
whose homelands we stole on the
way to the Canadian Jerusalem.

Correcting that historic wrong
gives us 2 chance to display a
great national soul, despite
everything thet wat before.

ARDAGH HUNTER TURNER | |

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