Our politicians need more experience in dealing with our native peoples before they announce they are meeting milestones. Milestones are just road markers for those who can read them. Talking with our native peoples is a process. It is like talking to the wind. What is carried where is always a matter of conjecture.
These are peoples with only an oral history of the times before Europeans started arriving on their shores. Their tales were told and retold in their lodges and wickiups and around campfires.
What other Canadians will skip over in a conversation, our native people will cover in detail. It is like cabinet member Carolyn Bennett probably didn’t notice the other day that the milestone she reached with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs had little to do with the problem of their supporters blocking train tracks.
Canadians, whether native or not, know that there have been many missteps in our relations with each other over the years. Sometimes Canadians meant well and really made a mess of it. Sometimes the native peoples were obliging and also regretted it.
But today, we are all tired of the failures of our politicians in seeking reconciliation. While we try to be polite and observe the rights of our native peoples to their treaty and ancestral lands, the actions of a few of them in blocking trains and roads has frustrated the general population who often have no idea what is the cause of the disruption and what can be done to rectify the problem. What it is doing is making race relations more difficult.
In an interview with grand chief Joe Norton of the Kahnawake First Nations in Quebec, Mercedes Stephenson of Global Television gave him a platform to state his complaints. What we heard was how limited his knowledge was of the concerns of the West Coast natives of Wet’suwet’en. His solution was that he could send some of his native police to B.C. to replace the RCMP (who are the B.C. provincial police) who seem to be disliked by the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs. That would certainly add more confusion.
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Copyright 2020 © Peter Lowry
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