The Canadian Caste System

 

It's all right there in black and white.

Friend Xerxes has identified Canada’s First Nations as our “Dalits,” the untouchables in our caste system. They are, after all, sequestered away on their sordid reserves without even clean drinking water.

I couldn’t agree more. The current reserve system is exactly what Martin Luther King fought against. It is segregation. Indeed, it is worse than that. It is apartheid.

However, ironically, it is not caused by any hostility or ill-will towards the First Nations, or any desire by the rest of Canadians to make them disappear. The roots of the problem are more complex. 

The Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau proposed abolishing the Indian Act and the reserve system in 1969, replacing it with a cash settlement. The chiefs of Alberta rose against it, and Trudeau and Chretien have been criticized for this ever since. The federal government wanted to abolish the residential schools too, as early as 1947. They were more expensive than sending Indian children to ordinary day schools. Here too, the Indian chiefs and band councils opposed it, and fought to keep the schools open until the late sixties.

The problem is, these things are established by treaty; it is not up to the Canadian government. They must have agreement from the chiefs.

Do the chiefs, in consistently opposing integration, represent the interests of the Indians? This is at least debatable. Band councils, designated permanent chiefs with powers to enforce their will, and reserves are all alien to traditional Indian culture. These are things created by the treaties themselves. Before this, individual Indians were more or less autonomous, moved constantly, and joined in groups or separated only for specific purposes. 

In recent years, councils and chiefs are at least supposed to be democratically elected. But there is no private enterprise or steady employment on reserve. The band council holds all the money, and is responsible for every aspect of your life. No one is likely to dare to express systematic opposition to whomever is currently in control. Should they lose the next election, or indeed, should they organize to contest it, they are liable to lose their home and their livelihood. It is a situation similar to that in a Communist country; or one too poor to have developed a middle class.

The one presence on a typical reserve able to stand against total control by the band council, around which a political opposition might form, has been the church and its residential schools. This is why the church is under attack by the band councils. It is the last check on their power, the last protection the individual Indian had.

Why are there so often problems with drinking water on reserves? Isn’t this, here as anywhere, primarily the responsibility of local government? Why is this not an indictment of the band council, and the band council system? 

One further big problem with the current system is that the chiefs have a vested interest in fomenting bad feelings towards the larger society. This maintains their power, it unites Indians against a supposed common enemy, and it keeps them in thrall on the reserve. Reconciliation can probably never come under the current system.

For Indians, or for the government, it is a Catch-22. 

My own solution would be to transform each reserve and each tribe recognized by treaty into a corporation, with each member holding a share. This would better reproduce the Indian tradition, without breaking any treaties. If any member dissented from the tribal management, he could sell his share and leave. Or he could keep and use it as collateral to start his own business.

More in my book, Playing the Indian Card.

Pikangikum

Pikangikum - Google maps.

Another mental health crisis in another Canadian reserve: Pikangikum.

The proposed solution: rush in 20 full-time “mental health workers” at a cost of $1.6 million. This adds to eight already there.

Pikangikum has a population of 2,100.

Over the longer term, we are told, the proposed solution is a “fundamental rethink of the way care is delivered on reserves.”

Yeah, that ought to do it. We’ll “rethink.” We’ll have a committee.

“The health-care system … First Nations people receive is not equal,” a local physician explains, noting “Canada has grown accustomed to witnessing this injustice.”

“It is inferior …. It is not equitable.”

This is obviously not true. One mental health worker for every 75 people? The people of Pikangikum clearly have access to more mental health help than anyone in Canada who does not live on a native reserve.

“Communities know what is going to work for them,” says local MP Bob Nault. “Why can’t we help support those plans?”

“Indigenous health has been focused on measuring the number of dollars spent as opposed to health outcomes,” adds Dr. Alika Lafontaine, the past president of the Indigenous Physicians Association of Canada.

In other words, the solution proposed by politicians and the press is to send yet more money to band leaders, with less accountability.

Yeah, that’s never been tried before. That ought to work.

To make things worse, that is. Obviously, no lack of mental health workers has caused the mental health crisis on this and so many other remote reserves. Nor has mucking about or oppression by the white man: these are the very places where the white man is not. The problem has to be the reserve itself; and its leadership.

Far from sending more money to the reserve leadership, increasing their power and control over the band members, the obvious solution is to get these poor kids off the reserves.

Apartheid is not an idea with a promising past.

Poor Little Fuhrer

Rich Jewish shop owners. From a Nazi poster.

It is a truism in the social sciences that abusers are people who have themselves been abused. But this is obviously wrong.

Simple common sense: who would understand the pain of being abused more than one who has suffered it? How then could they visit it on others? Moreover, abusing others morally legitimizes the original abuse. This should be an intolerable contradiction to anyone who has themselves been abused. So the I Ching, repository of the wisdom of the east, observes that “through oppression one learns to lessen rancor.” Just the reverse of what the social scientists say.

Social science has been interviewing abusers, the abusers have all said they were themselves abused, and the social scientists, not being very bright, are accepting this at face value.

Enter history. History is a far better source for understanding humanity than social sciences will ever be. Social sciences are worthless in principle. The study of history, however, leads to wisdom. Wisdom comes with experience. History is the study of the whole world’s experience.

To get to the bottom of what causes people to become abusive, consider societies and groups of people from the past universally understood to have been abusive. Who comes first to mind? Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, the segregated US South.

All of them would indeed, like those modern abusers interviewed by social scientists, have insisted that they have been abused. They too would have insisted that this is the reason for their actions. The Nazis held themselves intolerably oppressed by the Versailles Treaty--and, yes, by the rich Jews. The Boers considered themselves oppressed by the British during the Boer War, and by Imperial policy after that that they felt favoured blacks. The Southerners considered themselves oppressed by carpetbaggers and reconstruction following the Civil War.

An oppressed Afrikaner.

Were they in fact oppressed? Perhaps briefly; but this came within a wider experience of privilege. Versailles may have been bitter to the Germans, but it followed a period of success after success, culturally, economically, and militarily, during the late nineteenth century, not incidentally including imposing punitive treaties on their own opponents several times. Up until 1918, they were very much accustomed to seeing themselves as the rising star of Europe and of the world. The growing tip of evolution; the master race. It is when that seemed to be thwarted that they went berserk.

So too, the Afrikaners had a credible claim to being oppressed, but this was brief. Fifteen percent of all Boers died in British concentration camps during the Boer War. But this was a group accustomed for many years to owning and commanding black slaves, and to moving into new lands and throwing off the former inhabitants at will. They were a group of people so accustomed to having their own way that they found virtually any government intolerable.

A carpetbagger oppressing Southern U.S. whites.

And so with the whites in the US South: used to having black slaves do all the hard work, they saw themselves as New World aristocrats. Virginia credibly claimed to be the leading state of the union, home of most US presidents, until they lost the Civil War. Or the Protestants of Northern Ireland, accustomed to seeing themselves as the ruling class, then faced with the loss of that status at Irish independence.

Compare Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, or Jomo Kenyatta, who emerged from the deliberate oppression of years in prison to prove exceptionally mild rulers, reconciliation turning out to be their main concern. You don't hear a lot of whining from the Armenians either.

The lesson here is that it is not the oppressed who abuse, but those who have been accustomed to being pampered and to having their will obeyed. When they suddenly have that rug pulled out from under their jackboots and stilettos, they shift into overdrive, becoming obvious abusers. In other words, it is not the abused, but the spoiled, who abuse.

Yet these abusers will also see themselves as abused, and complain loudly about it. This is the psychological phenomenon dealt with so well in “The Princess and the Pea.” By contrast, the truly abused are most often incapable of seeing the extent of their own oppression, since it is what they have always been accustomed to. Fish know nothing of water.

Why do we hear so much more about the holocaust of the Jews by Hitler than about the holocaust of the Ukrainians by Stalin? Or the holocaust of the gypsies or Jehovah's Witnesses by Hitler? Or the much higher death rate under Mao? Because the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe were indeed, as the Nazis portrayed them, wealthier than their non-Jewish neighbours. Until the holocaust, they were accustomed to viewing themselves as in the higher reaches of the social order. They knew immediately that there was something wrong with the way they were suddenly being treated. Ukrainian or Chinese peasants? Gypsies? Not so much.

Therefore, those who complain most loudly of abuse or of being bullied in the public square are not those who have been treated the worst, but most often the bullies themselves. When these squeaking wheels are inevitably given government grease, it is almost always an additional injustice, which aids and abets their injustices against others.

Thus we see abusers branding the abused with being abusers.

Oppressed women, NYC, 1912

Such, for example, is the case with feminism. Who is more accustomed to being pampered than the average young woman?