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Originally Posted by PepsiFree
The fact is, aboriginal people do not need to integrate into Canadian society. Canadian society needs to incorporate their culture and way of life into what we believe Canadian society to be.
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Nice sentiments. What do they mean in practice?
Canadians like stuff. Houses and trucks and playstations and pizza. To get that stuff, they have jobs. They work 20 or 30 or 40 hours a week. To get jobs, they get training and move to where the jobs are.
I've lived in a Native community. You know what? They want houses and trucks and playstations and pizza too.
So how do we provide them? It's easy to say "provide housing." Do you know how costly it is build a modern house in a community that's inaccessible by road? When nobody owns their homes, and nobody has any incentive to maintain or improve them, it turns out the homes get quickly trashed. In a lot of these communities, nobody has any trades. When the plumbing breaks down, someone has to flown in from outside the community at the cost of thousands of dollars to fix it.
These are deep and intractable problems. Canada has not been ignoring them. Tens of thousands of earnest people with goodwill have been working for decades, and spending billions on trying to address them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by icecube
This is about as close as one can get to outright saying the residential schools weren't a problem.
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They were a genuine attempt to solve a problem. They caused tremendous suffering. But ignoring the alternative - Native children growing up illiterate with no possibility of getting jobs - was a problem too.
I'll ask you then: What would you do, as head of the Indian Affairs department in 1955?
Quote:
Originally Posted by icecube
And no, the adoptions weren't voluntary you moron.
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The vast majority of Native adoptions were voluntary. In that period, poor women, Native and non-Native, routinely gave up children for adoption if they couldn't support them. Canada was a very different place before reliable birth control and government welfare.