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Originally Posted by icecube
It's also laughable to suggest that our western civilization has the market cornered on so called "progress". Look no further at the state of the planet to realize how insane our materialistic consumer worldview is.
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I don't see natives turning their back on things like modern health care, automobiles, television, and the internet. It's not racist to say that the way they lived pre-contact would be considered dire poverty today.
Quote:
Originally Posted by icecube
The sustainable care-taking of our planet is a worldview we so desperately need. The 7 generations principle (based on the stewardship of mother earth) that First Nations peoples have adhered to, is not just some airy fairy spiritual mumbo jumbo. It was a necessity of life.
Traditional ecological knowledge had evolved over thousands of years of lived experience. That knowledge is invaluable and should be honoured and studied much much further.They have a ton of knowledge about natural phenomena, ecosystems, plants, animals, fisheries and on and on, that our environmental scientists and anthropologists are learning as we speak.
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Sorry, there's no evidence that this traditional stewardship was some kind of happy-clappy harmony with nature. Dozens of species were hunted to extinction long before Europeans set foot in the Western Hemisphere.
When I worked in the NWT, I covered the poaching trial of some local hunters. Four guys got on snowmobiles, went out onto Great Slave Lake, shot nine caribou in the matter of minutes, cut out the very choicest bits of each animal and loaded it onto sleds, and left the rest (90 per cent of each animal) to rot. The traditional lifestyle is over. Now it's high powered rifles, snowmobiles, and trucks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by icecube
It's a testament to the resiliency of the people that they refused to be assimilated despite 100 plus years of government effort (some, including myself would argue this process is still ongoing. Finally in the past couple of generations we are now seeing more and more First Nations (and Metis) who are medical doctors, lawyers, academics with PHD's, scientists, engineers, teachers, social workers, tradespeople, etc.
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You don't see a tension between living a traditional native lifestyle and being a doctor, engineers, social worker, etc.? You have to move off reserve to learn all that stuff.