"It's all about the kids" - National Day of Action highlights inadequate gov't programs and services
The book review of Marie Wadden's "Where the Pavement Ends" follows this article and provides another context for the National Day of Action efforts on the part of First Nations and their organizations to help Canadians understand the importance of strategically investing in the children, their families and their communities.
Day of action serious attempt to convey message
Doug Cuthand, May 23, 2008
There's a call once again for a national day of action in support of First Nations on May 29. This time the issues are serious and cannot be glossed over by politicians in Ottawa and the provinces.
The failure to recognize and implement the Kelowna Accord has left First Nations without alternatives or plans to attack the important deficit in lifestyle, education, housing and clean water in aboriginal communities. The accord hammered out between the former federal Liberal government, the provinces and aboriginal organizations would have provided $5 billion over five years to provide better education, housing and water quality, and to enhance health services and economic development.
Real targets were set. For example the accord set an objective of a 20 per cent reduction in youth suicide, childhood obesity and diabetes rates in five years and a reduction of 50 per cent in 10 years.
First Nations leaders, who first saw the accord as a turning point in history with consensus building and a positive outcome for their people, are now appalled at the lack of concern by the Conservative federal government. Now they see it as a lost opportunity and a betrayal.
The Conservative government has rejected the accord, but so far hasn't declared its own First Nations and Metis policy. This is in spite of the fact that the House of Commons passed a motion in support of the Kelowna Accord in March 2007, which was subsequently passed by the Senate. The Conservatives seem content to do things the old way and aboriginal people are not anywhere near a priority with this government.
The agreement, negotiated among the federal government, provincail governments and the stakeholders, certainly would have survived an election in the past. But it now appears that the Stephen Harper government has written off aboriginal people as supporters of the Liberal party and the NDP, and thus not worth courting.
Living conditions have not improved for our people and the problems that sparked the Kelowna negotiations are still with us.
The recent report from Auditor General Sheila Fraser, which highlighted the sorry state of First Nations child welfare in Canada, has become a focal point for Thursday's day of action.
About 27,000 aboriginal children are currently in the state's care -- three times the number of children taken from their homes at the height of the residential school system.
As well, the system is severely underfunded, with First Nations child-care agencies receiving 22 per cent less funding than provincial programs. The federal government in 1996 instituted a funding increase cap of two per cent on the budget of the Department of Indian Affairs. This means the department's budget increase is held at that rate even though inflation and the growth of the First Nations population are far higher. First Nations have seen their budgets capped while their population and demand increase relentlessly.
The ramifications of a budget cap that has been financially strangling the First Nations are clearly evident. This budget shortfall was the issue that precipitated the negotiations around the Kelowna Accord, which was designed to make up for years of neglect by Ottawa.
This situation has had a serious impact on First Nations. There is no money for initiatives that might reduce the impact of social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse, spousal abuse and school dropouts. This is why it's important that we stand up and be counted by participating in the National Day of Action.
In Regina, there will be a march from the First Nations University to the legislature starting at 9 a.m. In Prince Albert, FSIN Chief Lawrence Joseph will join members of the Prince Albert Grand Council. Premier Brad Wall and his western colleagues will be meeting in P.A. and it is hoped that they will participate.
The media and federal government were preoccupied on last year's day of action with the threat of violence, but it only materialized in Ontario near the Tyendinaga Mohawk Nation.
This year, so far, there has been an absence of threats and instead more groups are participating. This is an indication that the Day of Action is becoming more mainstream and a serious attempt to get our message out. The threat of blockades must take a back seat to the real issues that face our people.
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BOOK REVIEW - Where the Pavement Ends: Canada's Aboriginal Recovery Movement and the Urgent Need for Reconciliation
by Marie Wadden
Douglas & McIntyre,
264 pages, $36.95
Finding hope for the innocent ones - A wave of community-based native activists is creating a do-it-yourself approach to solving pervasive social woes
Dan Smith, May 25, 2008
I spent years traipsing around reserves and Inuit villages as a naïve – no, worse than that, woefully ignorant – city-bred interloper in pursuit of the solution to Canada's Indian problem. Yet for all the eloquent insights shared by many aboriginal activists, it took a former mayor of Toronto to most succinctly sum up, for my ears, what the Indian Industry and the billions it spends each year was really all about – or, rather, should be about.
"It's all about the kids," David Crombie spat out one day in the late '80s, after his unlikely turn as federal minister of Indian Affairs had come to an end. "Everything else is just chatty bulls---."
Exactly. While I came to really admire Crombie for his attempt to perform end runs around the entrenched bureaucracy at Indian Affairs in favour of smaller, community-based approaches, he got neither enough time in the job nor the support from Brian Mulroney's PMO to really undermine the operational paradigm of the Indian Industry – the need to perpetuate itself.
Indian, Métis and Inuit kids continue to kill themselves at a rate higher than anywhere else on Earth. They continue to suffer at epidemic levels as victims of joblessness, physical and sexual abuse, incest, fetal alcohol syndrome, addiction to booze, dope, solvents and other abusive substances. In the face of that miserable reality, most of the changes in government policies over the past 20 years – even counting for undeniable progress on some fronts – fade to more chatty insignificance.
So it was with a welcome sense of relief that I kept encountering solid evidence of hope for the future in St. John's-based CBC Radio journalist Marie Wadden's Where the Pavement Ends. Having spent a year exploring the supposed backwaters of Canada as a recipient of an Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy (sponsored in part by some of the owners of this newspaper), Wadden has identified a rising tide of a do-it-yourself, community-based healing movement that has genuine, demonstrable potential to undo the social pathologies native communities have endured for generations.
She demonstrates conclusively why throwing billions of dollars in outside-designed program funding at isolated communities is doomed to failure. Unless the pervasive social ills afflicting such places are effectively dealt with, until a critical mass of healthy community leaders can emerge to fill that role with proper support, a new reserve school here or a sawmill there will, by themselves, make little difference.
Wadden quotes Dr. Peter Menzies, an Ojibwa from Sagamok reserve west of Sudbury, who in 2006 was the Toronto-based manager for aboriginal services for the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health:
"Residential schools, the Indian Act, child welfare issues, the Indian agent and dispersing aboriginal people onto reserves that leave few resources – it's all that and more ... Intergenerational trauma is from individual to individual, family to family, community to community, nation to nation."
Edmonton psychologist Jane Simington summed up her two decades of counselling aboriginal women in prison. She told Wadden that the multi-generational damages of the church-run residential school system looms large:
"The trauma I see is huge, huge," says Simington. "Children were ripped out of their homes at the age of 5 for residential schools, and they didn't come back until they were 17. Many of them had been abused physically and sexually. Their parents were, in the meantime, at home grieving their children, so they turned to alcohol.
"And the whole thing about parenting and loving is that they are learned behaviours. Residential school students didn't learn to parent. When the anxiety gets high they strike out, because they're angry at themselves, and so these little innocent ones are an easy target."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is to issue a formal national apology on June 11 for the residential school system. Mississauga Indian judge Harry LaForme has just been named to head a multi-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the continuing damage. Ottawa has already spent $1.3 billion on compensation payments to former residential school students.
While Wadden applauds such moves, she argues persuasively that the best news is the swelling healing movement on reserves and Inuit villages across the land. She's interviewed many of those activists. Some are familiar to those of us who follow these matters and some are new players, part of a younger generation with a higher percentage of post-secondary enrolment than many other Canadian ethnic groups.
Wadden visited some of these inspiring folks. Phyllis and Andy Chelsea, the Shuswap couple from Alkali Lake, near Williams Lake in the B.C. Interior, who with tough love led a tiny reserve of drinkers to celebrated sobriety. It's shocking to learn they are now also dead broke, living like so many others in a mould-ridden house.
There's Maggie Hodgson, a Carrier from B.C. A singular catalyst for native-run, community-based healing programs, Hodgson came up with the idea of a National Day of Healing and Reconciliation. That's tomorrow, by the way.
We meet many more such people in Where the Pavement Ends, such as Burma Bushie of the Hollow Water Ojibwa of Manitoba's Interlake region. She pushed reserve elders and the Manitoba government to let them deal effectively with a local scourge of intergenerational sexual abuse through healing circles that brought victims and victimizers together – a sort of homemade reconciliation commission.
Regrettably, far too many of Wadden's 23 chapters read as snapshots rather than sustained community profiles. It's as if the articles Wadden prepared as part of her Atkinson Fellowship duties – the basis for a much-edited series that appeared in The Star in late 2006 – became the manuscript for this book. There's no sustaining narrative arc to drive reader engagement, and that makes Where the Pavement Ends something of a chore. This is a shame, given that one of the book's intended purposes is surely to expose unaware Canadians to the exciting developments in native Canada.
An exception is Wadden's chapters on the Innu of Labrador, the subject of her applauded 1991 book Nitassinan: The Innu Struggle to Reclaim Their Homeland. Wadden knows these folks intimately; that authority shows in rewarding ways.
As a foe of politically correct language use in describing Indian country – I think it often confuses general readers – the book's uppercase treatment of Aboriginal, even Indigenous, whether used as nouns or not, is a pet peeve. As for the repeated "non-Aboriginals" – oh, please.
Wadden has still done a real service here. Her advocacy of an end to both Indian Act waste and assimilationist notions, and for increased training and reliable multi-year funding that will give the healing movement the resources it is waiting for, is a message all Canadians should hear and absorb.
Star book editor Dan Smith is also a former Atkinson Fellow and the author in 1993 of The Seventh Fire: The Struggle for Aboriginal Government (Key Porter).