Raskolnikov quotes an item from the Edmonton Sun explaining why provincial test results for Grades 3 and 6 from Alberta Aboriginal schools aren’t being released. Phrases including “cultural sensitivity” and enforcing “stereotypes” say about all you need to know;
In other words, like all good postcolonial, cultural-studies eggheads, when they come across things they don�t like, they simply change the meanings of existence and history. Illiterate children on reserves are only illiterate because they have little grasp of their traditions and culture. The standard yardsticks of literacy and intelligence are irrelevant not only because they are oppressive, but because they also paint us in a bad light. So let�s change those colonial, Western standards and make them fool-proof � from now on, literacy and education will be defined as �knowing your own culture�. That�s it.
As with all things Raskolnikov, it’s a “read the whole thing” post.
Mike, you’d be wrong on the integration thing… the Native American is distinct, and has a distinctly different way of life. The Metis are of mixed heritage, but otherwise, most of em’ breed true… so to speak.
The problem is that all us “white” folks see that the reserve system is a failure, but all us other “white” folks, have set up a series of barricades which basically prevent us from dismantling the system. We are in the end completely helpless against a system that actively encourages segregation and second class citizenship. It’s “made in Canada” apartheid, and we can’t tear it down, because we’ve told ourselves it’s a right, Indians right.
A right to poverty, poor health, poor education, and no land.
Only the Indians can change it, and they have to have a reason. One which goes beyond keeping a people together, and instead deals with the issue of prosperity (or lack of) and competitiveness.
I’ve met many First Nations members that chafe against the system, but because of it, are helpless to get away. They can maintain their cultural distinctiveness, they don’t need a reserve to do that, but they’ve been sold the concept that they do, but the people the reserve benefits the most.
Education is the only way out for them, and when we as a country except this Federally imposed standard of mediocrity from the Children on reserves, we are screwing them, and ourselves.
We are still fucking them around, only now we do it with money and propaganda, instead of moonshine. At least when they were all pissed up, they didn’t have to notice their circumstance so much.
Now that they are drying out, what have we left them with… a piece of land that is communal, and cheque when their 18… big deal. I’m sure most would rather have an education, leading to a job, leading to a home of their own and security for their families.
Nope, we’ll just shovel more money into stupid programs that benefit 1 in a 100.
Don’t want dem Redskins to gettin edjucated, or dem ta git none of themthere high phalooten ideas of equality and opportunity.
Tomax is prescient: Evil Live:
But… not to worry: the page is egalitarian: Balance is achieved. Death for all. 72 Virgins every day for the boys; 72 lousy camels to curry/comb/feed every day in eternity for the girlies. +
Hamas Launches Web Site Encouraging Kids to Become ‘Martyrs’
Arutz Sheva – IsraelNationalNews ^ | 3/7/6 | Ezra HaLevi
Posted on 03/07/2006 1:11:59 PM PST by SmithL
The Palestinian Authority’s ruling Hamas terror group has launched a web site for children, preaching the moral desirability of being a suicide terrorist through cartoons and children’s stories.
The Hamas-run Al-Fateh.net glorifies shahada, martyrdom, and presents the deaths of terrorists attacking Israelis as a time of celebration, according to a report by Palestinian Media Watch.
One of the stories on the site quotes a mother saying that when she heard her son had become a shahid, a martyr, she bought dates, candies and coffee to give out. An entire section of the site is called “Stories of the Shahids” and the most recently posted story honors Hamas terrorist Naseem Ja’abari, who murdered 16 people when he blew himself up on a bus in Be’er Sheva on August 31, 2004.
The page is egalitarian in its encouragement of martyrdom, with a prominently featured drawing of a religiously garbed girl participating in violent attacks (pictured above) on both the homepage and on a second page with a poem glorifying Jihad, Islamic conquest, and Shahada. +
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1591849/posts
There is no question that the native people of this country have a distinct culture. There is also no question that they have been horribly mistreated historically.
But culture is an individual right, like free expression. It is NOT a “group right” or a license for the band leaders and the government to imprison reserve-dwelling natives in a paternalistic system that denies them rights given to other Canadians, such as the right to own and mortgage their homes.
The current native system is rightly compared to communism; it treats natives like incompetant children. No wonder the expectations for them are so low!
Give the natives control of their property on an individual level, and then let them decide if they want to stay on the reserves in the name of “culture”, or whether they want to sell what their piece of the reserve and move somewhere with better prospects.
My guess is that most of them will integrate within a generation or two.
why thank you maz2, had to look up the word: prescient.
Thought it was some kinda aftershave thingy…
Private Hebrew schools across Alberta won’t release their provincial Grade 3 and Grade 6 achievement test results for 2005, citing “cultural insensitivity.”
..Murray Berkovich, head of the Hebrew School Association of Alberta and a spokesman for the Temple Shalom Synagog, said the test results were markedly different from provincial averages. Releasing them would reinforce stereotypes about Jews without providing context.
“It doesn’t take a dermatologist to figure out what the result is going to be. Everyone already knows the problems we sometimes face in gentile society, so why make it look even worse?” said Berkovich.
Some Jewish students do quite poorly, but have their aggregate test scores pulled up by peers facing massive parental expectations.
Cal…
…and your point is?
Satire, a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
It is more easily recognized than defined but it doesn’t work with everybody.
Oooohh…satire…
And here I thought it was plagiarism but with the substitution of one race for another.
Just curious as to the Jewish slant.
Now that Harper is our Federal leader he will show us how to govern. He will fix all this Lefty mess. Just like Bush did in the USA. HAHA
This should be very interesting. My guess is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer(that means Natives). But that is okay because we know that the only ones worth supporting are those that get off their asses and become rich. The rest can eat cake until they too decide they want to become something more than couch potatoes. See, its all really so simple. Don’t ya love Conservatism.
Okay Steve d,
If you don’t like what has been suggested here, what, exactly is your plan for the issue?
Please enlighten us.
I posted this on the other blog that Kate linked to, thought I may as well paste it here to because I don’t think enough of the comments speak for me. Here it is:
I lived in Prince Albert, SK. for a year. During that time I worked at Ranch Ehrlo which is a youth group home. Maybe some of you have heard of it. All native residents there. Not by design, just that they�re the ones that end up there. Almost all white staff (me among them) there too. Not by design, just that next to no natives will work there and the one�s that do are too unreliable to keep on staff. The hand book indoctrinated me about the ideals of therapeutic this and that. Working there, I realized that all the staff who have been there long enough to know up from down are too cynical to be a therapeutic presence, and the kids are all too hopeless (read: without-hope) to ever become anything other than products of the system. One of the house moms summed it up best: �Things never get better for these kids, but at least while they�re here we can keep them from getting worse for a while.� My idealism died with that breath because I knew she was right. My heart still brakes though because most of those kids were only 1 decent-ass parent away from being really, truely, great kids. I really believe that. And it�s not money they need. They�ve already got too much. What they need is for somebody to give a damn.
God help us all.
Okay, GM
First note that it is very complex.
There is no solution short term.
Natives live in grinding poverty. They are isolated. They have been paid subsistence amounts of government money to remain a non-issue. This is done with all low wage,welfare people. It works because these people have low self worth. Nothing in their experience or history with the white man gives them reason to hope.
So now in our zeal to give everyone a chance we present them with what the white man(particularly the middle class) has found to be the great ticket up the ladder of success.
The problem is there is a whole subset of values and psychology that must be in place for this education to “take”.
Children, whether we know it at the time or not, are supremely affected by their parents. When they are deciding what to be, or not to be, their parents education and careers are critical to the childs decision making.
Unfortunately, the parents can’t display any of the middle class white norms that are assumed when one enters the educational bureaucracy.
Education is set up and designed to move children along who have the prerequiste mindsets.
As I said, it is very complex.
Solution?
Pay qualified teachers double wages on five year contracts, to go where these people live.
Pay the parents above poverty wages to learn sellable skills. Even if they don’t start working regularly within a year or two it doesn’t matter because their life conditions will be much improved as will their feelings about themselves, and they will have hope.
In short, they need to be socialized into what for them will be a new world. It will take time and money but in the end will be cheap.
okay Steve,
you’ve made some interesting points….
“In short, they need to be socialized into what for them will be a new world.”
Agreed.
But wouldn’t the best way to do that be help them get off the reserves?
“Pay qualified teachers double wages on five year contracts, to go where these people live.”
Similarly, couldn’t this be done the other way around? By providing natives with the means (by recognizing their property rights) and incentives to leave the reserves and move their kids into the regular school system? (a flawed system, to be sure, but better than what they’ve been given on-reserve)
“This is done with all low wage,welfare people. It works because these people have low self worth.”
Very true.
But will it really improve their self-worth to pay them not to work while training them for skills that are useless on-reserve because there are no jobs (or economic base to support jobs)in those places?
“Natives live in grinding poverty. They are isolated. They have been paid subsistence amounts of government money to remain a non-issue.”
Exactly!
The band leaders are paid off by the government and given unaccountable control of these isolated communities in return for making sure no one complains too much.
The Reserves are basically Gulags. Anything we do to put power in the hands of individual natives, as opposed to band leaders, will be progress.
What we are seeing now is the natural result of stranding people in the middle of nowhere with no opportunities and zero control of their lives.
I will agree this is a complex problem, and getting people out of the “Gulags” won’t be easy or simple. But I believe the best hope is to help naitves integrate.
Funny, used to be a lot more natives in the construction end of the oil industry, some of the most highly skilled in their fields, holding some of the highest positions. That was when government was not so generous with those people who chose not to work. Now with the industry faced with a serious shortage of labor, positions where training is available, remain unfilled.
Sorry Steve d., your intentions might be noble, but your premises unsound. You haven’t related any personal experience with the community, perhaps you have some. It seems though that those others on this thread who do have such experiences, offer considerably different opinions than yours.
Steve D, I have to ask, do you have any experience on a reserve? Do you have any idea of how the mindset works on the typical reserve? Don’t misunderstand me, I’m glad to see you postulating something as opposed to deriding everything.
What you say is true, the context you take it in though is the same error we are already making. Teachers on reserves are already as well paid as off-reserve, parents are subsidized heavily to try and do other things employment wise.
The primary issue is how funds are distributed, who distributes the funds, and who hold the distributers of funds accountable. The holes in the system on reserve are primarily designed so that a few can benefit over the many. Take a look at your average reserve off the Federal site at http://www.aboriginalcanada.gc.ca/acp/site.nsf/en/ab80001.html
You can drill down to the list of band council and chiefs. When you do you’ll notice that probably 90% of the reserves in this country are controlled by a single family on each reserve. You don’t have the right connection, your getting nowhere on a reserve.
Piss the Chief off and your life becomes shit. Piss his wife off and you might as well move off the reserve.
All the funding, all the resources that a single native would require to get ahead in any fashion, stem from the signature of either the Chief, or Band and Council…
Indians in this country have taken the oligarchical model to a whole new level.
I just finished refusing to put a cardlock in for a particular band in Alberta, because the main point behind it was to enable the band chief to hand out giftcards for band members prior to an upcoming election. Completely oblivious to the fact that it would constitute bribing for votes… on federal land.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met someone on reserve who just wants to better themselves, but at some point they, or another family member, has gone against the council on an issue, and their lives are effectively shut-off from that point.
The children don’t need a mindset change, they need a mindset period. There isn’t one, unless your part of the in group on reserve.
We keep assuming that Indians are just like us at the end of the day, and it’s simply not true. They have very distinctive concepts of family (stronger than the average Canadians I might add), they have a different view on almost all of what we would consider cultural norms.
Most importantly though, they are still getting treated like shit by the mainstream society, and the way we give them money allows them to treat each other like shit as well. One native friend of mine once told me that the only way I could understand how the First Nations feel is if I was a black man living in the deep south in the 40’s. He said then, and only then, could I begin to understand an Indians position in Canada.
I told him he was full of shit… now I’m not so sure.
Ah… no use talking about this, no one off reserve gives a shit anyway, and by the time people do begin to take notice, the criminal element on reserve and their lawyers will have the Supreme Court handing away our homes to the First Nations Council.
Maybe when the final bill comes in people will have realized what our lethergy has cost us.
I was speaking of the way long term to improve test scores.
If THEY want the white man’s lifestyle then they will have to be acculturated into white mans’ ways first.
If they do not want white man’s ways then there is no point testing them against white man’s measurements.
Natives have been stuck between wanting some of white man’s ways while wanting to preserve their culture. It takes at least two generations to acculturate an immigrant family in the big city where there are few supports for his old culture. To have native communities, isolated and virtually self sufficient in most important ways makes this process painfully slow.
Until these test scores become as big in native minds as they are in middle class Canada there won’t be any change worth measuring.
Hi Steve,
I guess I was thinking in more general terms…
But Let me put it this way:
1) either natives want to live on-reserve or they don’t. This is an individual/family choice and the natives should be as free as possible to make it.
2)If they want to stay on the reserves, then the tests don’t matter.
Why? Because living in isolation with no working economy condemns them to permanent poverty and dependance.
reserves are NOT virtually self-sufficent. Most of them have an insufficent economic base. They require massive government funding, and even then can’t provide basic services at a non-third-world level.
3) Natives deserve better, and will choose a better option if it is offered them.
Our cities integrate immigrants in large numbers, with (mostly) reasonable success every year. Once in the cities, it would be easier (though still a challenge) for natives to integrate, but it could happen.
Therefore,
4) We should help and encourage any natives that want to leave the reserves to do so.
If they stay on the reserves, they accept dependance, and education won’t matter. For those natives, the money is better spent on infrastructure and housing.
For those that want something else, we should make things easier.
While the test marks are a disturbing indicator of reserve conditions, improving the test scores won’t solve much.
Your thoughts?
Don’t know why you folks fret so much over this Indian thing. Just pay your taxes,shut up and pray the Cree don’t realize the Alberta oil sands are actually theirs.
macdonald….Hang on a minute,I’ll give them a quick call just to make sure they know it’s theirs.
GM
Change is never easy. Their conditions are third world but it is home.
What you are asking the natives to do is to give up on their heritage, their community and leave their comfort zone(such as it is) and move from isolated community to big city. Good luck.
Perhaps if the carrot were big enough you might get some to bite. If they are successful it could conceivably cause a migration of serious proportions.
If you could lure a few families with proper support, financial and social. It might work. However, what would others think? We have a lot of street people in Toronto. Also there are immigrants and migrants who might take umberage at Natives getting all this support. Politically it is risky. We really have a whole subculture of desperate people both on and off the reserves so it is not going to happen who are we kidding. I say stop testing them until we are ready to get serious about the problem.