Today was the anniversary of Prime Minister Harper's apology to the Red Indian over the Residential Schools. Six years later, lots of lazy liberal media outlets were doing followups. Possibly the worst was last night's Alberta Prime Time segment featuring a sob story (from a woman who, it should be noted, could read and write) and then reminiscing about those horrible "Truth Reconciliation" events (where the truth, that the Residential Schools educated Indians, which I thought was something we wanted) and demands that the Canadian taxpayer, yep you guessed it, needs to do more.
More? How about less?
Which brings us to this blog's coverage of the Harper apology from 2008. Global News this morning did a bit about "which date did this happen", and it was fun to be able to shout out the answer. Still, I still really like this bit:
The spirit and intent of treaties is questionable in the modern world, where technology has meant that "traditional native ways" are quite meaningless. Our "traditions" from the 17th and 18th centuries haven't held up, so why should we assume that Indians should act and be treated as if they have not? Furthermore, 'government to government' relationships work way better if one of the governments isn't in fact paying all the costs to the 'citizens' of the other. Can we finally lose this "government to government" bullshit? The City of Edmonton and Ottawa can communicate "government to government" with far more legitimacy, and the former is still totally subsurvient to the latter. Same with these "native self-government" dealies; the native government doesn't actually have any powers or responsibilities, so it cannot be possible for them to have a hand in negotiations. In all practical senses, the native governments are Ottawa's bitch.That last bit comes to mind when thinking about the most recent education efforts being done in Canada: as you may recall, Harper proposed a bunch of money (with a tiny number of rules) to educate Indians, and they didn't seem to like that either.
It's pretty obvious that Indians fall into two camps. The camp that wants to get educated in English, and become a normal functioning member of society living in a normal community. And then the other camp, that wants to live on reserves and be uneducated and at the teet of the Canadian taxpayer in perpetuity. It looks like there are more of them in the second camp, doesn't it?.
If the Red Indian wants to remain uneducated, we may have to let them. They may starve in the process. We may have to let them do that too. Whichever road we take, there shouldn't be any need to apologize. That woman in the Alberta Primetime video never had it so good as when she was at a Residential School.
