Quote:
Originally Posted by Sliver
Um, they can move. AFAIK they aren't trapped on the land. These aren't prison camps. I don't know, if it's so bad they could always move, grab themselves some free university, get jobs and earn some money? That's what every other Canadian has to do when they find themselves in poor economic conditions (minus the free university).
What culture exactly do they even think they're preserving at this point? I'm pretty sure the plan wasn't for them to be supported by the Canadian government for 100s of years. My understanding of the reserves was they were so they could preserve their way of life by hunting and living in tipis apart from mainstream Canadian culture. Now a good number of these reserves just seem to be disasters.
I can't believe you'd ask how they can survive and not be welfare cases. It seems so defeatist. I survive by not being a welfare case because I live somewhere that has jobs and I get up and go to work every day. It's really not that hard.
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You'll never get the majority to just up and leave their homes, nor should you expect them to. Just like how people who live in tornado zones never leave. When a place is your home, it's difficult to give up even if there is poverty. People like being close to friends and family even if it comes at a cost. It's one thing to relocate from a place like Toronto to Calgary where you have reasonable direct travel between the 2 centres, but to expect someone to move from community with barely any outside access and isn't financially feasible to visit, it's a big sacrifice. Many of them might never see their family again. We don't bury our dead there, so it's really easy to disassociate ourselves.
The other side of it is that I really doubt that the government suddenly wants every impoverished First Nations person to suddenly take them up of free education and other assistance that would be necessary for integration.
Whether we like it or not, these communities exist and simply hoping that people decide to abandon them is never going to play out. The only choice is to develop their economies so they are sustainable, or to continually bail them out. And let's face it, some of those northern reserves have nothing to build an economy off of.
Of course, the other choice is to just let them linger and eventually die. I don't see that as a realistic option though.
The situation with the state of many of Canada's aboriginal people is complcated well past the "why don't they just move" point.
At any rate, I was commenting on Chief Louie's point of view that the government should be spending more on community develop instead of asisstance. Enticing people to leave their communities is actually the opposite of what he was talking about.