We Are All Treaty People

Colby Tootoosis;


The reasons why we have Land (not in an in ownership sense but in a Sovereign Nation sense), Treaties, and that we are even alive is because our ancestors refused to “get with the times”. What does “get with the times” really mean, anyway? Does it mean to ignore the Consciousness of our bloodlines that is connected to our land and to identify ourselves with modern day colonial borders? Does it mean to participate with the abuse of the land by the extraction of resources and adopt same values as the colonist? Does it simply mean ignoring our indigenous values all together? Quite honestly, “getting with the times” never made sense to me when it’s used in a counter argument against those who are defending the land and following through in the inherit qualities and values of indigenous consciousness.
The reality is it is time to become the best we can possibly be and follow through with the certainty that we are Nations within a Nation. Part of that is denouncing the imposed identity that we are Canadian. My friend Jodi Kechego articulated it well when he stated “My bloodline is inherently separate from Canada in that my ancestors have been here for literally thousands and thousands of years- as apposed three or four generations”.

Dude, ten thousand years ago our ancestors were stone age peoples, too. We decided we didn’t like it. But if that’s what you want, that’s cool. You can drop by on the weekend to return our wheel, metallurgy, electricity, antibiotics, and the internal combustion engine.
You can keep the horse.
h/t Shere Khan

39 Replies to “We Are All Treaty People”

  1. They can also drop off all of those dollars the government keeps sending them. After all, if they are not Canadian then there is no reason for us to pay support.

  2. Canada should set out a large portion of land,on which the Aboriginals can go and live exactly as they did before the terrible White Man came.
    I wonder how long these modern activists would last in that situation.
    CBC did an interesting series a few years ago,where several people were to live just like the pioneers in Manitoba, same tools and methods of farming.
    Maybe they should do the same type of “reality” show with some of these Noble Warriors.

  3. I m sick and tired of these whining aboriginals and their supposed rights and entitlements. If it were not for the evil white man most of them would not even be alive today because their ancestors would have been wiped out by disease and starvation. Its past time that they along with all the other minorities ethnic and otherwise stopped wallowing in self pity and started paying their own way in the world.

  4. If the Indians/First Nations/Aboriginals don’t want the treaties, let’s rip them up and get rid of this ‘status’ malarkey. Let them pay taxes and for hunting licenses and for their own housing like everyone else and see how they like it.

  5. There is a pretty good chance that many of these injuns don’ t remember sleeping on the ground and having to catch, kill, and cook their food every day, or the shorter life span, the potential to become bear food and as stated all the modern life conveniences centered around energy.
    Ingrates, just like the American blacks, and other 99% people who have no idea what real poverty and repression are like, who are getting fat off other people’s hard earned money.
    Perhaps we will get tired of being vilified for simply existing and stop paying the bastards.

  6. Looking around the poorest parts of the world, there are many places where
    there are always at least three constants in play together:
    Poverty.
    “Communal” ownership of land.
    ………………………. (which really means it is all controlled by the corrupt and)
    ………………………. (they take the best and leave the powerless with the rest ,)
    ………………………. (Haiti being an excellent example).
    Destruction of the communal lands through overgrazing, neglect and abuse.

  7. If you are a native living on a reserve surrounded by rusted out car hulks, trash, and dilapidated housing, but your chief(s) own race horses and Cadillac Escalades then your problem is not with the whites who pay taxes to support you.

  8. All of the above and Kate’s paragraph sequel to the thread topic sum this up well.
    Yes, return the horse and revert to shank’s mare.

  9. Without enablers in government, academia, the media, business, and international busybody community, Colby could be easily ignored, left to watch himself on the big screen TV in the remains of a modular home somewhere. Unfortunately, those enablers ensure that the nation will never be able to get rid of the corrupt bantustans that dot the national landscape.

  10. Spoken like a true, formerly formidable, plains Indian. Not only are they jealous of European success, they are also deeply resentful of their much more prosperous kin, often referred to as “Fish Eaters” out west. The Haida used to go on great expeditions to round up several hundreds or thousands of the plains tribes as slaves, but the arrival of the Spanish, French and English put an end to that in short order, which has allowed what was once nothing more than a starving herd of humans on the edge of extinction to develop into what we now see as Idle No More welfare bums and Grand Manitoba Chiefs etc.
    What a sad, sad waste.

  11. And they should be using smoke signals and drums to spread their message of oppression instead of the internet.

  12. So I guess they won’t be picking up those welfare checks any more. And they can forget about voting, too.

  13. So true. However, the poverty pimps don’t want to lose their cushy public teat jobs, and until we clean these clowns out, nothing will change.

  14. Yeah well, I dunno about the Haida interior slave raids but there is a body of history of the grease trails….where coastal types packed whale oil inland to trade.
    There is no question, that the advent of the “Horse Culture” greatly transformed the plains tribes swiftly…..bringing prosperity…..and war…..leapfrogging over development that took old world populations millennia.
    One detail that is often ignored is that Eurasians utilized chariots for millennia for the simple reason that horses had to be bred bigger to carry a rider. The puny horses forced the refinement of the spoked wheel to make chariots lighter/faster. Once horses became big enough to support a rider…chariots were promptly abandoned.
    The plains FN had that advanced critter delivered fully developed.
    Once agin…it seems that war is more than jus’ guns and shootin’.

  15. Well, now. The awful truth is that purchasing the fruits of industrial civilization (almost all of which was conceived by the Protestants of England, Scotland and Ireland, your conquerors in battle) with bank confetti you did nothing to earn, being allowed to spend your days drinking like fish, eating like pigs and breeding like rats, when you aren’t begging for money for drink from decent people on the main street of every city in the Dominion and they trying to go about their business, and cursing them when they refuse, is a jolly good sight better than what you deserve.
    I’d have sent the French Canadians and all their works and their infernal jabber to the flames right behind you and yours, resting assured that nothing of value would be lost, and they are as white as I am (the ones whose forefathers you didn’t sire yourselves with the French “king’s daughters,” anyway).
    Aye, your tribes were denizens of the Americas for thousands of years. What is that to us, or to the Almighty? The sons of Amalek and the rest of the Philistines infested Canaan for centuries themselves before the children of Israel showed up to claim their inheritance. The Lord thought just as little of delivering Amalek into Israel’s hands as He did of delivering you into ours. Israel would have been spared a great deal of misery themselves if they’d listened to their Lord and finished the job of removing Amalek from the face of the earth. It’s our own fault for not learning from their mistake.
    If all attempts made to make Christians out of you weren’t a complete failure (and our Lord Himself knows there were many), and you weren’t still so consumed with vanity, you might have been prepared by now to say with Job: The Lord gaveth and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
    I shan’t hold my breath. If being defeated in battle that utterly and being suffered to continue to exist at all only on account of the misplaced Christian charity of your conquerors didn’t teach you anything about humility, I don’t know what will.

  16. I met a Native host at the “Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump” south of Calgary. He knew a lot about the old ways and still practised it by choice to connect to his roots. During his presentation he never blamed “The White Man” for anything. He said we were brothers from across the big waters, not invaders. Now if more people took his stance instead of the pity parties we have had for generations we’d be much better off.

  17. *
    in a history of the bay of quinte area, home to the tyendinaga mohawk people, published way back in 1869, a noted local historian writes that, sadly, there is but one full-blooded mohawk left in the area. it seems the intermixing of the aboriginal immigrants (invited in from the mohawk valley in new york state after fighting against the american revolutionaries) with the mostly scots, english & irish settlers has, a couple of hundred years later, produced a population that, physically, more closely resembles mitt romney than chief thayendinaga.
    don’t believe me? take a drive through the reserve. true, there has been an incredible amount of inbreeding since that time, but if you look at a a picture of say… noted spokes-native shawn brant… you would be way more likely to conclude that he hails from eastern europe than the great western plains.
    the unending columns of social workers, race hustlers & poverty pimps all work overtime to concoct this myth of the noble savage. the chiefs and their families & friends that rule these little socialist fiefdoms live in fear of losing their 12 billion dollar a year handout from the federal government. they oppose both individual property rights & legislation about the equality of their wimmen-folk. the inordinately high rates of crime, substance abuse & family violence attest to the efficacy of their system of governance.
    and, like the canadian senate and the partisan snivel service… as long as we the people allow it to continue… we deserve whatever comes down the pipe. i say give each of these reserve dwellers a million dollars each in return for renouncing the reserve system. then let them make their way in canadian society without any further public wet-nursing.
    it’d be way cheaper than what we do now.
    *

  18. I wonder how old this person is because if they are anywhere north of 30 then chances are if they were still living like the ancestors they would be dead from disease, accident, starvation or misadventure or possibly be a slave of another tribe.

  19. Really, really good example of that, and it was terrifyingly interesting to watch (like a building on fire…) was Mugabe and Rhodesia. Had been a net food exporter with lands in private hands, now a textbook poverty-ridden state.

  20. Al @12.36
    The woman in the picture with the Guardian article looks strangely like Heather Mallick and I’m sure she would concur with the sentiments of the column.

  21. Turn in your Government (tax payer) paid 60 Inch TV’s if you hate this culture so much.
    While your at it you can drop off the oxycotin.
    Any way Canada’s “New” peoples will I’m sure take good care of you as the rest of us have for centuries with goodies.Good luck with that.
    The evil white man’s society is dying off, from lack of children. Hey but you have all the wonderful rainbow of diversity third worlders coming.
    One thing you can bank on. None of them will be paying you a mortgage to live in this Land. For they too rely on Working peoples taxes to live as people who where abused by “Imperalists”. Guess which party will in the end win the welfare race?

  22. Dick – I knew it was you before I scrolled down to your name. Wondered if you’d read David Warren’s latest at Essays in Idleness? He reports that Charles Darwin’s great,great, great granddaughter – has lost “faith” in scientific materialism, and joined the Church of Rome. Even more wonderful, I thought, was that she is also, on the other side of her family, a descendant of John Maynard Keynes! Of course it would have been almost as satisfying had she become a Presbyterian or an Anglican or Methodist, or whatever.

  23. Dick – I knew it was you before I scrolled down to your name. Wondered if you’d read David Warren’s latest at Essays in Idleness? He reports that Charles Darwin’s great,great, great granddaughter – has lost “faith” in scientific materialism, and joined the Church of Rome. Even more wonderful, I thought, was that she is also, on the other side of her family, a descendant of John Maynard Keynes! Of course it would have been almost as satisfying had she become a Presbyterian or an Anglican or Methodist, or whatever.

  24. I love your reply, which is similar to what I always say. Want to live by your culture? Fly at ‘er. Back to teepees, canoes and bows and arrows, along with a life expectancy that ended with your fertile usefulness, as most other lower organisms live.
    Btw, I believe that while the horse originated in the Americas (hippo-something), it was a tiny creature and went extinct. It was the Europeans that brought horses back to the Americas, and set them free rather than boarding them on the trip home… so, give that back too!
    In fact, I think the only animal domesticated in the Merica’s was the dog, which they used to pack goods behind them on two poles.
    The goat hadn’t even been domesticated. Something other civilizations did six thousand years or more earlier.
    Any Canadian museum will extol you with their superior system of living though.

  25. This POS makes me wonder about how low ones IQ has to be before this argument makes sense to anyone? One very simple fact seems to escape this history challenged individual — there was a war between the white settlers and the Indians and the Indians lost. Unlike the Spaniards who simply killed all the people they found in the territories they conquered, the British invaders let the nomadic peoples live.
    Native Indians, being members of the species homo sapiens, also formed organizations of multiple individuals and fielded military forces to fight the military forces of other collections of individuals and the winner owned all of the land and possessions of the defeated party. Nowhere is it written that only certain types of wars are allowed.
    Any moron who believes this crap should be forced out into the wilderness a few hundred miles from the nearest settlement with just the technology that native Indians had pre-Columbus. Those who survive the experience would be far less likely to write any further idiotic articles like the one quoted.
    Right now the standard mode of transportation for Indians who live in S. central BC is a pickup truck and cell phones are ubiquitous in this population. Most of the Indians I run into are far too busy working for a living instead of writing crap that only coastal moonbats might find meaningful.

  26. sasquatch;
    Interesting observation. The Mongols did pretty well with their smaller horses.
    I have read most of Jared Diamond’s books which also give an interesting slant on developments around the world. He commented on the lack of animals of any size in the Americas that could be domesticated for human use. In Eurasia there were horses, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, camels etc. Advantage Europeans. Also commented that the early involvement with domesticated animals caused exposure to more disease which built immunity for Euros which the Americas never had.

  27. Good points but the CBC, CTV etc,love the Coastal moonbats. All moonbats for that matter. When does one ever see coverage on normal working Indians ? To our MSM Chief Spence was the normal hardworking downtrodden Indian

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