4 - Wednesday,

December 10, 1986 -

North Shore News

Bob Hunter

® strictly personal ®

SINCE THE subject renders my esteemed and honored colleague Doug Collins positively apoplectic, | can’t resist

going ona little about

Doug called me a liberal the other day for quoting the angry words of Sechelt chief Fred Dix- on. A liberal! Come on, Doug. You sure know how to hurt a guy.

Actually, on the issue of In- dian rights, | would prefer to think of myself as being just a teensy-weensy bit radical.

That is, as stated here before, | think the native people should be given self-government, which is to say autonomy at least equal to municipal status.

Also, | think their land claims should be dealt with fairly so the book can be closed on the rather ugly imperialist phase of Cana- dian history, which isn’t finished yet, and won't be until outstan- ding legitimate native grievances are one way or another resolved.

By Canadian political stan- dards — particularly B.C.'’s dou- ble siandards — that's fairly wild stuff, The Liberals, as a party, I might add, never came close to such a position during their long stints in power in Ottawa, when,

| as lona Campagnolo finally ad- mitted, they got so hooked on the

f perks they forgot their respon- sibilities.

Pierre Trudeau, as ! recall, wanted the Indians to give up their reserves and move into the cities and be like the rest of us, whatever that means.

i With only one asset to their names — namely the pockets of real estate on to which they had been driven against their will in the first place — they sensibly refused, just as 1 would refuse if somebody came along and said here, Bob, why don’t you give up

*‘our’’ Indians.

your pruperty and move into an apartment and be part of the mainstream? Sure.

Set. Collins and ., 1 should point out, are fellow Warriors of the Word Processor in the relent- less media battle against the forces of Communism, the Post Orifice, red tape, censorship and the Prime Minister’s office.

Moreover, we are always ready to hoist a hairy-chested pint together, both being utterly macho characters,

Doug lifts weights better than me, [| gotta admit. But then | think I hold my liquor better than him. Y*know?

As destiny would have it, we disagree on a few minor philo- sophical items, like immigration (i'm in favor of it), homosexuali- ty (I say you've got a right, even if it is disgusting) and Indians.

Indians.

( say, never mind trying to go to Soweto, Doug. Try visiting a reserve here in British Columbia. Do me a favor and don't make it one of the relatively rich urban reserves. Make it one of the places out in the bush.

I'd be interested to see your on-the-spot analysis of how it got that way and how it’s going to get out of going on that way for- ever. And, also, yes, in terms of the day-to-day cffect on the average Indian, it would be in- teresting if you could spell out exactly how superior our Cana- dian system is to South Africa’s!

What is the latest figure on mortality rates among native children? They are four times likelier to die than the rest of our kids and about that many times

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Yet many individual Indians do just as well as anybody else. We have a clear case of a struc: tural problem here, Doug. And

the new generation of political |

leaders among the native people understands this perfectly.

J predict that unless the various levels of Canadian governments make seriutts and reasonable ef- forts to come to grips with the land claims question, instead of hoping it will go away, the next great debate in Canada isn't go- ing to concern the fate of the Quebeckers, it is going to be about the Indians.

Canada’s high-profile political attack on South Africa guaran- tees that sooner or later the world's attention is going to focus on these oh-so-pure Canucks and how they REALLY treat their own indigenous peo- ple.

A solution of some kind, | sense, is in the works. A minor sign is the fact that the likes of Doug and me are debating the issue in public. ft wasn’t many years ago that the only stories you saw in the paper about In- dians was under a cute headline making a joke about the Indians being on the “‘warpath,"' ho ho.

We have, iti fact, just barely got past that point. Increasingly, however, I think Canadians from all walks of life are going to see that their own national pride, which is the root part of identity, is tied up inextricably with the terms of the final peace we make with ‘‘our’’ native people.

Let it be just. We put the issue off so long that a lot of us thought it had gone away. It didn’t. {1 couldn't, There was no place for it to go.

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