Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
This idea of who owns the land is a bit redundant in my eyes. The history is too complex. All we can agree upon is that Indigenous people were here first but even that isn’t too meaningful of an observation.
Human society is in constant flux. The arrival of Europeans to the continent was perhaps inevitable, but we have to remember that colonialization took hundreds of years. There was plenty of violence - as there had always been. There was also disease, without which conquest of the Americas would not have been possible.
What really concerns me, from a Canadian perspective, is the concerted government effort to contain and assimilate Indigenous peoples - a process that is only about 180 years old and is still ongoing.
If you miss that last part, you’ve completely missed the point.
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The end-game to the issues we face regarding FN people is to de-segregate the population. We've established a segregated population with good intentions (we know how well best intentions have worked re residential schools).
When you have a an ethnically diverse population, over multiple generations, it is natural for those groups to mix. I'd argue that it is also healthy and normal, but I'll leave that up to you.
Instead we've set up a system which incentivizes racial segregation (the reserve system) based on a concept of the sins-of-our-fathers. It is remarkably like the concept of Original Sin in Catholicism - born a sinner. Trying to carry a balance sheet through multiple generations into perpetuity is a harmful and likely impossible effort.
At some point in the future it is inevitable that we view colonialism and the conflict that characterized the early history of european settlement as distant history. This type of history should be maintained, but it should not necessarily inform current policy. It should definitely not be used to try to maintain segregation along racial lines, which is the current MO of our gov'ts. I think it will take a long time to unwind a belief system which insists that you are owed something (or owe something to someone) based on your genetic makeup. But that's a shame, we should start on it sooner rather than later.