Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny199r
The problem is:
1. Remote living off the land is pretty impractical now due to the way the world and economies are structured.
3. First Nations have treaties which create obligations for the government (people want to try to forget that, but you can’t)
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Great prospective,
I'd add two points here that I think often get glazed over.
1. Even if it was plausible to live off the land these days, I'm not sure we would look back a hunter/gather lifestyles, health care, living conditions... and consider it an acceptable standard of living for modern day Canadian.
I'm not making the claim that we should look at reservation life and consider it an acceptable standard of living, I'm just saying that if we had a subset of society living freely off the land without modern shelter or transportation or healthcare, without some form of sewage or water treatment... the conversations would be the same. The appeal to nature / noble savage myths that are used to say that just leaving indigenous peoples alone are not a cure-all for the problems they are facing.
3. Clearly the treaties are not working, I think there is a very good argument that they need to be re-negotiated. I'm just not sure there is enough good-faith between the two sides to have honest negotiations. Leaning on broken / out dated laws and rhetorically attacking eachothers right to exist isn't a great place to start from in negotiations, then you start getting into the challenge of who Canada would even be negotiating with, there would need to be hundreds of different groups represented all with different problems as you pointed out. I don't even know how either side would approach the prospect of renegotiating the treaties.