Quote:
Originally Posted by vid
Forced relocations, removal of land and rights, forced assimilation and abuse in schools and from members of the community created and continue to exacerbate these problems.
|
If this were true, the problems would be less among natives and native groups that were less affected by these occurrences. Is there any evidence that that is the case? For example, are there native groups that had relatively little exposure to residential schools -- are they noticeably better off than other groups? Are there natives that long continued to live more or less traditional lifestyles on land that no one else cared much about (e.g. in the far north of northern Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec or the NWT)? Are those groups better off than those that were put on reserves in southern Canada?
If we're going to assert causal relationships as you are doing, then we should be able to make hypotheses and predictions of the type I'm suggesting and test the strength of the hypotheses by looking at actual data. What native groups were most/least affected by these hypothesized causal factors? All other things being equal, are those groups the worst off/best off today? If not, or if the correlation is small or non-existent, maybe we need to adjust the hypothesis or consider other causal factors.