Early Canadian governments used a divide-and-conquer approach toward indigenous relations. By separating indigenous people into 600+ separate First Nations, instead of allowing them to maintain traditional cultural alliances and negotiate as larger tribes (similar to how they're set up now at regional and provincial levels), they made the process of assimilating them easier. Preventing them from leaving their reserves severed ties to nearby reserves, and they essentially couldn't communicate or organize back then to advocate for their own interests. Several generations in, each First Nation tends to see itself as a separate community from the others as opposed to one part of a larger, regional community, and each chief sees themselves as the lead negotiator between the crown/government and their people, as opposed to have a few representatives make deals on behalf of many First Nations.
The fact that "consultation" means 600+ meetings with all of those reserves, and essentially unanimous agreement among all 600+ chiefs for laws to pass without controversy, means that easy fixes are essentially impossible. A lot of indigenous people are pushing for democratization and regional co-operation between First Nations and the crown/government but they're up against the wall of the Indian Act and stubborn (sometimes hereditary) chiefs, who under that Indian Act have many more powers than they should, and being indigenous doesn't preclude one from being greedy.
Well luckily for them, this stuff is between indigenous people and the government. The average white person in Toronto really doesn't
have to be too invested in the details of these efforts, they simply have to voice support for a solution to be found, as opposed to staying silent and apathetic to the problem. No one is asking Southern Canadians to come up with solutions, we just want them to support the solutions that are presented so that they can be put into effect.
There is a similar problem that the government has when negotiating policies, like universal health care, with the provinces: how will the system work? Who will provide the services? Who will pay for it, and how will they get the money to pay for it? Is the programme permanent (like social insurance), based on periodic intergovernmental agreements (like universal healthcare), or temporary (like infrastructure programmes)?
And keep in mind:
the government has to make this deal with 600+ separate entities. That's one of the biggest hurdles, and that's a problem that the government created itself in order to give itself the upper hand 100 years ago.
Yes.
They raise these issues in local media. For example, the water treatment plant in Fort Hope failed a few weeks ago because of arson cutting off the buildings power supply and damaging a pump. (It was only out for a few days—not every situation where water treatment isn't available is a permanent problem). In Rankin Inlet a decade ago, it was because a snowstorm cut power supplies for several days and the frozen water damaged the entire system. In Marten Falls, it was a lack of water treatment operations not maintaining the system correctly that led to contamination issues and eventually a boil water advisory. In Gull Bay, the pumps failed and no one will pay to fix them.
The problem is where the funding comes from. Repairing a water treatment plant is considered a capital expense, that comes out of the INAC budget. They don't want to pay for it though! So they say it's an "emergency". Emergencies are dealt with through contingency funds. That funding isn't separated line-by-line and seems to be limitless. So while Marten Falls needs a $50,000 filtration system to be back up and running, it's much cheaper for INAC to let another government agency (such as Ontario Clean Water Agency) to take over the "emergency" instead by spending $350,000 per year flying bottled water to the community instead. INAC saves money, OCWA is a "hero", and the natives have water. Win-win-win!
A lot of communities have put in applications for water treatment system repairs and been denied them because of costs. (This happens for housing too). In some cases, where OCWA isn't involved in bottled water and INAC supplies it from its own emergency funding source, they often delay release of funds (typically once per quarter and sometimes they require the band to pay the bill first and then simply reimburse them) which makes the community look bad if they keep ordering water and can't pay for it on time.
But another thing people overlook: Because of the size of reserves, and the way the Indian Act governs housing on them, it forces the reserves to be dense. They can't be spread out like a rural white community like O'Connor. They have to be dense. And often, the lack of electricity supply means they rely on diesel generators, and those require large storage tanks which often leak. That means groundwater becomes contaminated with a wide variety of toxic chemicals, and therefore unsafe to drink, so there is no choice but to build a community-wide water treatment station. But only 500 people and the school only goes up to grade 8? Who is going to run it? And once it is up and running, you still have to deal with the fact that you've just plunked a "colonizer's toy" in the middle of a community that experiences the worst poverty in this country. If you're a troubled youth who wants to "fight back" against an oppressor, what are you going to target? Probably that fancy new thing "the oppressor" just plopped into town.
And then that brings us to the social issues, and...
It's an incredibly difficult situation to be in.
Now the water is fairly easy to solve: a high efficiency, compact ultrafiltration system which requires minimal maintenance and can be maintained by someone who travels from community to community on a regular basis—many communities in Northern Ontario have this kind of set up. Marten Falls, iirc, was given a proposal for one but INAC rejected funding for it because there was no capital left for it that year. In a secure, fireproof building you greatly reduce risk, but how do we pay for that system? How do we pay for 89 of them to provide water to the communities without clean water? How do we pay for a couple hundred more to replace outdated systems many communities rely on? And we still haven't solved the pervasive social problems they face!
Everyone at that ceremony was Canadian. I think what you mean to say is "white supremacists can't disrupt indigenous ceremonies", and with that, I agree.
But that's essentially what it is, when you have an understanding of how the treaty was negotiated and interpreted by both sides at the time of signing and in the present day. The government has even acknowledged the land was originally stolen and that it can't necessarily be returned, that's why they've been paying billions of dollars to First Nations bands over the past two decades through the land claims process.
Except that in the Spanish colonized countries, despite the caste system, their indigenous populations tend to have more of a say in society. They weren't assimilated into Spanish culture; Spanish and indigenous cultures were melded together into a new culture. There are still problems there but there is also greater control for indigenous people in many of those countries.
Canada took a more apartheid-like approach (apartheid was actually inspired by Canada's and the US's of indigenous peoples, except they turned the dial up to 11) and that's the root cause of our current problems.
None of our communities had water treatment or electricity until the late 1800s. You can't expect that just because people are indigenous and live in the north that they have to remain nomadic. If we applied this idea to white people, we'd be telling them to go back to England and drink tea with scones because we didn't have white-Canadians pre-contact.
Also, there are remote white communities our there. Moose Factory isn't a reserve, it's a town that's 60% white. Pickle Lake is 60% white and it's 8 hours
north of Thunder Bay. Churchill is a majority white community whose current connection to the world is by airplane or ship.
There are always problems delivering things to remote communities. Hell, Thunder Bay struggles with this. We routinely run out of produce, meat and fuel due to hiccups along the supply chain, since we're literally at the end of it for almost everything we need. Should Thunder Bay be shut down? Should Armstrong? What about Newfoundland's outports? All the tiny, shrinking farming communities in the prairies?
Most of those reserves actually came to be located where they were because fur trading posts—a feature of the rational, first world economy of the time—were near by, and native trappers were their main suppliers. Why do you think they have names like Fort Hope, Fort Albany, Fort William, Moose Factory, York Factory, etc? (A factory is a kind of trading post).
We can say the same about dying farming communities and former mining communities and abandoned railway water stations. But we don't. I don't know why we don't, we just don't. Why
does Allan Water still exist? No one knows! They don't even have a school but there they are, 100 white people in the middle of fucking nowhere. No one ever bitches about having to pay for them? For every native person living in a remote community in this province, we've got 5 white people doing the same thing and no one ever says "force them to move!"
Canada took 9 million square kilometres of land from First Nations, and on that land built a $1.7 trillion/year economy. $8 billion (0.5%) goes to INAC, which serves about 1.6% of the population.
Indigenous people were promised, by the nearly illiterate white men who brought them the treaties in the first place a century ago, that the government would provide them with homes, schools, and healthy communities, even though that wasn't explicitly laid out in the treaties. Remember that at the time, indigenous people had an oral culture, and that still today, many of Canada's traditions are oral and unwritten as well. There's the reason and the precedent. It has been passed down orally by the descents of the people who signed those treaties that the communities that signed them were promised things by the crown that, in their eyes, the government fails to deliver. I feel that the treaties were negotiated in bad faith, but our country's legitimate claim to the land depends on their validity. For much of our country's landmass (and much of its resource wealth), the only real claim we have that that land is firmly Canadian land is a piece of paper that a few native chiefs who spoke no English were essentially tricked into signing in the late 19th century. It helps that unlike most oppressed minorities, they don't active campaign against our country and seek full independence. They could be like Hamas and terrorize us; they don't. They don't want to. Be glad that the worst of "native people oppressing us fragile whites!" is a native elder asking a journalist to leave the room.
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