i spent a large portion of my upbringing in lillooet, i think i'm as qualified as any honky to lend some insight.
lillooet has five or so reserves in the area, and the town population is typically 30% aboriginal. there's also ethnic diversity in a japanese minority (lillooet was an internment camp...) and east indians, etc.
there's some decent reserves, like fountain lake, that are run well - and then there's reserves like pavilion, which is run quite badly. lillooet shows you how good the native reparation situation can be, and how bad.
growing up i saw the divisions coming, and you know what, it was native parents taking their kids away from white kids. separate ball leagues. separate after-school activities. native kids that did well at school or tried to hard were beaten up and given real hard times.
what this all taught me was that it's the system that tells native people they're victims, teaches them to resent and hate.
this same system teaches the rest of us canadians that we're always going to have less rights, and so a lot of us end up hating and resenting the native people themselves.
this whole system, as it's set up, fosters racism and hatred and until
EVERY CANADIAN IS BORN WITH EQUAL RIGHTS REfataing_GARDLESS OF WHO THEIR GRANDPARENTS WERE
then we will see racism, hatred, etc.
it will always be there but we in canada are doing everything we can to grow and nurture this divide.
it must end.
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