Residential Schools are back in the news in Canada. For those of you not in the know, we once tried to educate the Injuns. We failed. Along the way a few people got hurt, and now everyone thinks they’re owed something. Anyway, that’s the short version.

Now there’s a healing commission happening out in Winnipeg. It’s called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, yet truth doesn’t seem to be required at all.

“You will not be questioned. You will not be asked to prove anything. You do not have to share anything that you do not wish to share,” commission chair Justice Murray Sinclair told those in attendance.

Whoa. This Commission is meant to document abuses, but anyone can just walk in and spin a yarn. How does that help anyone?

Letting any old Joe Snakefeather off the street come in and tell lies is a helluva way to detract from the suffering of real victims, as well as to make the government and other responsible parties grossly overestimate the amount of damage actually done. This commission is literally requesting false rape accusations, since much of the abuse to the native kids was supposedly sexual in nature.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo acknowledged that the hearings need the support of the wider Canadian public if they are to be successful.

“It’s going to be entirely dependant on the average Canadians to embrace, learn and understand,” Atleo told CTV Winnipeg. “It’s going to be dependant on the school systems to share this.”

Share lies? Like the smallpox blankets? This commission seeks to “document” events that may or may not have happened at all! Our kids are already learning revisionist history that plays on white liberal guilt every day. They learn less and less about how hardy pioneers founded a country out of snowy tundra, and more about how the noble savages were fucked over - sometimes literally.

If there is a nugget of truth at the core - and I do not doubt that there is - then that nugget should be carefully preserved as part of our history. But to allow random bystanders to share what might amount to falsehoods, and call it history, is disgraceful.

Paint Canada in its true colors - for good or ill. But don’t take hearsay as fact and make it part of the picture.

As an aside…

Joseph told the crowd it took him nearly all of his 70 years to share the “dark, ugly, painful, degrading, dehumanizing secrets” of his residential school experience.

Joseph said the sexual abuse he endured, as well as the loss of his culture, left him angry, ashamed and an alcoholic.

“I didn’t know how to raise my family. I was just so angry … I don’t want to pass my anger on any more,” he said.

Um… so how about the thousands of native families that weren’t affected by the Residential Schools? What’s their excuse for alcoholism and poor child rearing? Like this guy?

They destroy the body’s natural defenses, leaving themselves open to infections that in a well-cared-for body would not be fatal.

But even if that were not the case… It would still make sense to send the body bags.

But Grand Chief David Harper says he’s not satisfied. Harper, who represents northern First Nations, said they want an apology from Aglukkaq and they want Wolfe’s resignation.

Saying the body bags were part of a routine shipment is “an excuse that is totally unacceptable,” Harper said. “We don’t even accept his apology. The only apology that we’ll accept is from the minister responsible for health and well-being of our First Nations.”

With a potential election looming on the horizon, it’s pretty damn clear to anyone that this is political pot-stirring to get attention. As usual.

But let’s ignore that for the moment.

Let’s instead look at the fact that body bags are part and parcel of the emergency health kits. Let’s look at the fact that if a pandemic hits in the dead of winter, and many reservations are difficult - if not impossible - to access in winter, there may be an addition health concern of no bags for bodies. What would happen then? Um, how about the hue and cry of whinging natives about how they’re ignored and no body bags were ever sent to them? Yeah, I could see that.

Looks like a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And of course, the aforementioned political pot-stirring by the Liberals. They’ve had a bad week, what with Jack! Layton siding with the Tories against an election. They need some straw to grasp, and they’ve chosen the Indians.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said yesterday the body bag shipment “sends a message – it simply says: `We expect aboriginal Canadians to die.’”

Not as quickly or as painfully as your dreams for a fall election, Iggy.

Ah, the plight of Canada’s Natives. Wait, correction - Canada’s on-reserve Natives. There’s a difference. A big one.

Those who live off the reservation, if left to their own devices and not meddled with by either touchy-feely guilty white liberals or by the Chiefs -  Native equivelent of Al Sharpton and other race pimps, can usually manage some degree of assimilation. They may in many cases still collect social assistance or have substance abuse problems, but they are still far more adept at functioning within the larger society.

Those on the reservations… not so much.

Canada has approximately 400,000 Native living on-rez, at a cost of $8 Billion to the taxpayer. We keep them in these concentration camps as a sop to their traditions - traditions that existed 400 years ago when we arrived, and would have changed over time with the new surroundings, but which are now propped up by wishy-washy do-gooders who think that our Natives should still live in an infantilized version of 18th Century customs, with the added bonus of SkiDoos and satellite television to remind them daily of the lives they’re not living somewhere closer to civilization.

If a teenager completes ninth grade, he or she is probably better educated than many others on-rez. And so he can then work within the system, joining the Band or Council, making decisions that affect the lives of the others in his community and apportion the tens of millions of dollars allotted to his particular reservation. He does not need to know anything about engineering to make decisions on vital infrastructure. He does not need to know anything about health and safety or policing or anything else that affects the community. After all, a reservation is merely a Potemkin Village, with the Bands and Councils all for show; in the end, the feds step in to solve the problems that the infantilized residents cannot.

If we as a white European community wanted to give the Natives their 18th Century traditions back, they would be living in teepees and log cabins, not in derelict, mouldering modern pre-fab homes. They would not be driving snowmobiles or watching American television on satellite cable. They would not be reading this article on the Internet. Instead we have offered a half measure between dragging them forward and holding them back. The result is stagnancy, and just like stagnant water, the Native communities are attracting rot and disease.

And two more of their number have died.

A coroner’s jury looking into the deaths of two aboriginal men in a fire at an isolated northern Ontario reserve’s police station three years ago has called for more federal and provincial funding to improve First Nations police facilities and officers’ training.

Ricardo Wesley, 22, and James Goodwin, 20, burned to death on Jan. 8, 2006, while being held for public intoxication at the ramshackle Kashechewan First Nation police detachment.

Among its 80 recommendations made in a report released on Thursday in Toronto, the five-member jury called on the Ontario and federal governments to provide the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service the funds needed to ensure its policing standards and infrastructure are equivalent to those in non-First Nations communities.

The jury’s report also recommends Ontario and Ottawa should also provide adequate money for annual fire inspections of all Nishnawbe-Aski Nation police stations, as well as additional fire response training for officers.

Money, money, money. At what point do we stop throwing money at the Reservations in some lame attempt at making the problems go away? This is the very definition of insanity: Repeating the same action over and over, expecting a different result.

As an evil white European responsible for the creation and maintenance of Kashechewan, I will shoulder the responsibility for the lack of sprinkler system in the jail. But here are the things I will not shoulder responsibility for, in no particular order:

• No functioning smoke detectors
• No fire extinguishers
• Keys that were not clearly labeled or marked, stored in a disorganized fashion
• Lack of a fire escape plan
• Lack of adequate police training
• Lack of adequate fire employee training
• The two drunks that got themselves locked up in the first place

Guys, what did you do with the last $8 Billion we gave you? Did you spend it on candy and records? You wanted your own police and fire services - this is not like a little kid wearing a fire helmet. This is real grown up, you-could-get-hurt stuff.

Canada, and the Department of Indian & Northern Affairs, needs to make a decision. Are these going to be child-like people we will be caring for in perpetuity in sub-standard insane asylums, or will they be functioning members of Canada?

Michael Ignatieff and Michael Coren both hold the same views of our native Indians. The Michaels believe that we should feel responsible for the deaths of the two little native girls at the Yellow Quill reserve in Saskatchewan last January, because we wicked white men introduced the fire water to the poor but noble savages.

Which as most of you readers know, I believe is total horseshit.

In Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff’s much touted and barely read book True Patriot Love, he opines thusly:

To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.

No, Iggy. It is NOT a story about us. It is a story about a corrupt way of life that breeds substance abuse through a lack of self-reliance, and it is the story about two little children that had no reason to believe they were in any danger at the inept hands of their drunken lout of a father. This is not a story about me, and it is most certainly not a story about you, you arrogant Harvard professor/Canadian of convenience. How do I know this is NOT a story about me? Because from the time I understood the difference between “reservation” and “real world”, I have chosen the latter and railed against the former as being a hotbed of lethargic iniquity. Not a damn bit of good can come to any child of the rez system, so long as touchy-feely do-gooders like Ignatieff and his ilk continue to feed the depravity out of some kind of racist white guilt.

I’m not as eloquent as Mark Steyn, who probably rarely-if-ever uses the term “horseshit”. Yet we seem to be pretty much simpatico on Ignatieff’s hypocrisy.

As to the idea that it’s “a story about us,” no, it’s a story about him: the vandalism he does to the memory of Kaydance and Santana Pauchay, the tasteless opportunism of cashing in on their fate by conscripting a grimly particular episode to the cheap generalities of societal guilt, the horrible glimpse inside the husk of a man once genuinely engaged by Iraq and Bosnia and reduced by ambition to peddling what he knows to be bilge.

To be sure, one could argue that it is “about us” in the sense that Christopher Pauchay wouldn’t be taking his daughters for 50-below midnight strolls in diapers had the white man not unloaded the boat half a millennium ago. Or, alternatively, it’s “about us” in the sense that the lavish government “compassion” and neo-segregationism of the last half-century have inflicted far more damage on Canada’s Aboriginal population than the bead-sellers, mythical smallpox bearers, Victorian imperialists and Christian missionaries could have accomplished in their wildest dreams. I naturally incline to the latter view, which is no doubt “racist.” But isn’t the real racism Ignatieff’s? In seeking, by his weaselly language and revolting argument, to burden all of us with Pauchay’s actions, the Liberal leader is being the quintessential New Racist: he and I are sophisticated human beings who are accountable for our actions, but Christopher Pauchay is excused. To Ignatieff, Pauchay is not fully human, but something closer to a lame animal whom one cannot reasonably hold responsible for his moral choices. If I had to be on the receiving end of whitey’s condescension, I think I’d rather be a “noble savage” than an incorrigible one.

So what has this to do with talk show host Michael Coren? Some of you may remember my appearance on his show back in march, when the subject of Christopher Pauchay’s sentencing circle came up.

Michael was pulling the whole moral relativism that surrounds the alcoholism of the native population, and decrying that us honkeys had a hand in the deaths of Kaydance and Santana. While I can’t exactly remember what I was doing in January 2008, I am fairly certain I was not out in Yellow Quill, either forcing booze down Pauchay’s throat or dragging his nearly-naked daughters out into -50 temperatures. And I will not be tarred with the brush of guilt on account of my white skin and green eyes.

Were you? Was Coren or Ignatieff? Of course not. The deaths of Kaydance and Santana mean nothing to them, or really to the rest of us beyond another tragic tale in the news, yet they must be seen to be making the appropriate mouth noises concerning the natives. The drunk, slatternly and morally corrupt natives whiling away lost lives in government funded (but not enforced, never enforced) concentration camps.

If Christopher Pauchay had been a typical Canadian in Brampton or Fredrickton who had committed this grievous act of negligence, he wouldn’t be pitied and my disgust would be shared by others. I wouldn’t be pooh-pooed for pointing out that he is a corrupt man in a corrupt system, yet should still be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. No, because he is one of the red men, we must coddle him and flagellate ourselves for ever having been born in Canada, descendants of wicked Europeans who raped and pillaged their way across Pauchay’s virgin lands.

To this, I cry horseshit. I didn’t kill those babies. Neither did Michael Ignatieff, Michael Coren or Mark Steyn. And I will not do penance for a crime of someone else’s commission.

The disgusting drunken reprobate who froze his baby daughters to death won’t be getting the smudge stick and lifetime supply of feathers that his idiot peers suggested as punishment. Instead some mean white judge decided that a criminal should go to jail. Imagine that.

A Saskatchewan father who drunkenly lost his two young daughters outside in a snowstorm has been handed a three-year jail sentence for their deaths.

Christopher Pauchay, 25, pleaded guilty to criminal negligence causing death after his daughters — three-year-old Kaydance and one-year-old Santana — were found buried in snowdrifts in January of last year.

The prison term comes despite calls from an aboriginal sentencing circle that Pauchay be spared jail time and be allowed to heal in his community.

Dear Injun “Leaders”: You have proven yourselves useless, and will not be allowed at the adults’ table again. Too bad, so sad. Here’s a feather.

And an idle Monday afternoon is as good a time as any.

During a conversation with a friend over the weekend, he said: So, if the price of gasoline is back down, can we cut the handouts we give to the reservations accordingly?

… comes not from yours truly, but from the CBC!

Winnipeg is Canada’s murder capital
Edmonton, Calgary also cited by Statistics Canada as having high homicide rates

How long before one of the FN chiefs comes out and denounces this report as being skewed against criminals aboriginals?

Can we talk openly about native issues?

Not in this country. Better to just ignore the problem, and hope it will die out all on its own. It’s the Canadian way.

Colonies both, Canada and Australia have more in common than just the Queen on our money. They also have that little spot of bother with the natives…

Australian Aboriginal children remain vulnerable to sexual abuse a year after the government sent in police and soldiers to clean up their remote communities, the author of a report into the problem said on Friday.

Aboriginal groups are expected to hold weekend protests to mark a year since the former conservative administration ordered a sweeping intervention in outback towns and settlements to tackle chronic alcoholism from “rivers of grog” and child sexual abuse.

“They’re more vulnerable because they’re not in a school situation, they’re not in any disciplined situation. They’re just left in a house,” said Rex Wild, the co-author of the Little Children Are Sacred report which led to the intervention.

Wild’s government-sanctioned report found child sexual abuse was widespread in indigenous communities and alcohol posed the gravest threat to the safety of indigenous children in the outback Northern Territory.

Australia’s 460,000 Aborigines make up about 2 percent of the country’s 21 million population and have consistently higher rates of unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence, and a life expectancy 17 years less than other Australians.

Rivers of Grog? Sounds like an Indie band… But I digress.

What do you think would happen if you gave a drug addict $10,000? How about $20,00 to a self-destructive alcoholic?

What about those people who have never had money in their lives, and suddenly win the lottery? We all know how quickly and destructively they blow through that cash (disclosure: It took me 18 months to run through the “blood money” I got when my dad died). They didn’t earn it, so it means nothing to them. Every day is a party, till the funds run out.

First Nations in the Yukon want to know how many deaths followed the arrival of compensation payments to former students of native residential schools.

Aboriginal leaders have noticed a higher than usual number of funerals in communities across the territory in recent months, even prompting one chief to organize a territory-wide prayer circle next week.

No one can say for sure how many of those deaths are attributable to the thousands of dollars in common experience payments going to former students and the social problems, from alcohol and drug abuse to suicide, that can arise from such payments, combined with their recollections of the residential school experience.

So the Council of Yukon First Nations says it will conduct its own count to get some firm numbers.

A prayer circle? Yup, that’ll do it. Beat a few drums and burn some sweetgrass, and surely there will never be another problem in the community again.

When the Natives do absolutely nothing except smoke, drink and fuck their daughters. This Friday will mark the Native Day of Action(tm) here in Canada. It’s their chance to whine and complain that us white guys who pay 45% in income tax to support their smoking, drinking and daughter-fucking are ripping them off. How they can justify that, we’re not entirely certain. But what we can be certain about is that it will cause a new committee or study group to be formed - also at our expense - and it will solve exactly nothing.

I have no sympathy for the plight of the Natives, any more than I do for the Palestinians. In both cases they have the choice to get the hell off the rez, become fully-functioning, voting members of democratic society, but instead they choose to live in concentration camps, hands out to the government, ever ready with a complaint on their lips for the shoddy treatment they chose for themselves. Shut up and get to work, losers. You can bang the drum (not a euphemism for daughters) on the weekends, the way some overgrown white boys still get together to rock out in a garage band. But Monday to Friday belongs to The Man, same as it does for the rest of us.

Which neatly segues into an article I read this morning, about the trouble with Native populations sniffing gasoline to get high.

Aboriginals in Labrador are hoping a new fuel that doesn’t intoxicate gas sniffers could help solve a persistent problem among young people in their communities.

But even though BP has offered the formula free to anyone who promises to produce it, it’s still not clear how Opal gas, developed in Australia, could be brought to the Canadian communities that want it.

“We’d love to have it available in Canada,” said BP spokeswoman Anita Perry. “The issue really is logistics.”

Opal gas was developed as a partial response to the problem of gas-sniffing in aboriginal communities in Australia.

Daniel Pottle, a member of the Nunatsiavut government created by the Labrador Inuit land claim, heard about the product last Christmas through contacts with a business development group at Newfoundland’s Memorial University. Intrigued, he travelled Down Under this spring with a delegation of Inuu, Inuit and government officials to see what Opal’s effect has been.

“Where the product is being used, gas sniffing is no longer an issue,” he said. “We came back with a very positive impression of this product.”

This is taking things a little bit too far. When we’re in the process of trying to stave off environmental damage, and reduce dependency on foreign oil, BP is wasting their time and energy creating a sniff-proof gasoline to deal with the huffing problem so common among native populations. And now Canadian natives from Newfoundland want in on it. Guess who pays?

Yup - that’s right. You and I, the whipped taxpayer. We’re not paying enough in gasoline taxes, now we’re expected to foot the bill so the notoriously substance-abusing natives will have one less thing to huff? Here’s a better idea: why not just remove petrol stations from reservations? Then when they complain that they can’t get around, can’t get out to bingo or whatever, can’t fill their snowmobiles, freeze to death in their Northern climes etc, we can remind them why. Bad enough most reservations have to lock innocuous substances like mouthwash and cough syrup behind the pharmacy counters. I, for one, do not wish to be buying these people snort-proof gas because they can’t take responsibility for their own lives.

Let’s not have just ONE day of Native Action. Let’s have 365 days of it. Maybe then they’d find they only have the same problems everybody else has, and not these bizarre problems that seem to proliferate while you sit collecting the dole and looking for something to complain about. You know what? Make it 364 days - they can have Christmas off like everybody else.