I work with First Nations on behalf of major Canadian and American oil and gas lines. I suppose I am a consultant. I have conducted hundreds, maybe thousands, of intensive interviews with a whole range of individuals, from Chiefs to average joes.
There are several issues that I am probably uniquely able to personally understand in regards to First Nations, and their current plight in this country.
a) carefully-constructed ideological identity related to the rise of land claims in both the US and Canada, this identity has repeatedly been proven to have nothing to do with historical identity;
b) impregnable tribal leadership that benefits from a constant stream of public and private goods that they control absolutely;
c) poorly advanced or developed civil society - ie. no independent fiscal bodies to investigate how band funds are spent, no real free elections;
d) an ideological Supreme Court and governments too cowardly to act;
e) people like me, consultants and lawyers who benefit, and create the stream of revenue that maintains aboriginals in the cycle of poverty;
f) the collapse of the family - many reasons for this, and residential schools are only a small part of it. Certainly, many of the problems that I deal with as a tertiary element of my work are not at all traceable to residential schools.
For what it is worth, I think the TRC, like all public commissions, was hijacked by special interests to the extent that very little of what we read and see in this report is quantifiable or historically verified. Certainly, there are large traces of truth, but lots of this stuff is misdirection.
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