How many of you, dear readers, have actually set foot on an Indian reserve? [That would be "reservation", for U.S. readers. ed.] You may have driven through, as you're hurtling along Highway 17 on the north shore of Lake Superior, but you didn't really see it, did you. What you see is just the occasional sub-standard house, the odd rusting car or pickup. It could be any impoversithed rural area.
Believe it or not, there are some reserves that are relatively prosperous, not much worse or better than an average Canadian town or suburb. If you've got oil under your reserve, you're probably doing OK. So also if your reserve has its own casino or if you're located close enough to the U.S. border to profit from, er, cross-border trade.
One such is the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve, near Montreal. Because of that proximity, they have easy access to a large job market and have become quite prosperous while benefiting from fiscal privileges granted to reserve residents.
"Reserve residents" -- there's the rub. Not a few white men and women have devised a simple but clever scheme for getting onto the reserve. By marrying an Indian, you get to be an honorary member of the band, so to speak, with all the rights and privileges that goes with Indian status.
Now the Kahnawake band council, alarmed at the number of palefaces in their midst, has given 26 non-Mohawks ten days to fold their tents, as it were, and leave the reserve. Most of them are non-native men living with Mohawk women. Indian men married to non-native women aren't being targetted, which suggests elements of racism and sexism in the new ethnic cleansing order.
Families will be broken up and husbands and fathers expelled from their homes, unless the women follow their partners off the reserve. But if they do so, they and their children will lose their family homes and their ancestral rights.
Does all this remind you of anything or any place you've heard of in the past? It reminds me of South Africa. For 45 years, that Nationalist government of that country had a formal system of separate development called "apartheid". Its aim was to have separate living areas for whites and the different black peoples who inhabited the country.
The South Africans went so far as to set up "native homelands" which had their own governments, even their own postage stamps, while remaining part of the larger republic. Canadian governments have been trying for a century to figure out how to resolve Indian land claims without having the guts to bite the bullet and give the Indians more land, rather than billions of dollars of taxpayers' cash.
The Mohawks of Kahnawake are being loudly condemned by the Doers of Good in our society for blatant racism [and sexism. ed.] for wanting to get the non-Indians off their reserve. The hypocrisy is breathtaking!
We tell the Indians they can have these small chunks of land to replace the billions of acres that they were conned out of by those who spoke with forked tongue. We tell them they can run their own local governments, make their own laws, even have their own police forces. Then we affect surprise when they want some say in who's going to live there!
Let me say it again. It is our natural condition, as humans, to want to mingle, socialize, associate and live with other people who are like ourselves! In Canada now, we are told we can't do that. We have to welcome whoever wants to be our neighbours, be they saints or scum of the earth. But the Indians got excepted from this forced multiculturalism. Now we tell them they can't discriminate against non-Indians because to do so would be to violate their "human rights".
To follow that, er, thought to its conclusion, what the federal government should do is dismantle the reserves altogether, open up the Indians' land for settlement by anyone [including real Indians? from India? ed.] and pretend that we're all one, big, happy, Canadian family.
Footnote: Don't take me to task to task for using the old-fashioned term "Indian" instead of "First Nations person" or "aboriginal" or whatever is p.c. these days. I heard a Kahnawake resident on the TV news and he called himself "Indian" so that's good enough for me.
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