To some (loud) critics of #IdleNoMore: Some More Constitutional Dots

Ignoring for the moment all the “I’m sick of my hard-earned tax dollars going to lazy/drunken/corrupt/entitled/non-taxpaying/freeloading Indians!” criticisms of the cross-cultural popular movement known by its twitter hashtag, I’d like to confront one of the criticisms that might seem a little more difficult to argue against: “There shouldn’t be different types of Canadians: we should all be equal.”

Part One: the Constitutional Historical stuff

Now, in fact, that superficially appealing suggestion is not a criticism of Idle No More.  It is a criticism of decisions taken by politicians beginning in the 18th Century and continuing to today.  An Act passed in 1774 by the Parliament of the United Kingdom means that a lawyer educated today in Alberta must retrain if she relocates to Quebec and wishes to practice law while the same lawyer relocating to Newfoundland will not need the same new training.  And, because of that same Act, a lawyer trained in Quebec will have a steep learning curve if he relocates to English Canada. The Quebec Act of 1774, building on the “Distinct and Separate Government” clause of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, make Canada a Constitutionally unequal state: the people of Quebec are not governed by the same set of Federal laws that govern the rest of Canadians, and, as the Quebec Civil Code is Constitutionally guaranteed — and so, Federal law — those living in the other provinces are not governed by the same Federal laws as are the Quebecois.  That’s right: We’ve got different laws for different people, and those laws have been upheld and sustained by centuries of parliamentary debate, First Ministers’ Meetings, Royal Commissions and Judicial decisions.  If you don’t like the fact, you’re welcome to try to get a Constitutional amendment passed.

What does this have to do with Idle No More

Well, that Royal Proclamation of 1763 clearly acknowledges that the aboriginal people of British North America are “Nations” under the protection of the British Crown, just as Prime Minister Stephen Harper recognized in Parliament that Quebec is a “Nation” within Canada.  Furthermore, the Treaties reinforce this recognition of the indigenous societies as having distinct and separate governments, just as the Quebec Act of 1774 did for Quebec.  And centuries of parliamentary debate, First Ministers’ Meetings, Royal Commissions, Judicial decisions and the Constitution itself  have upheld the fact that the First Nations, Metis and Inuit are distinct, different Nations within Canada, despite the legislative attempts for a century and a half to solve the Indian Problem through assimilation or elimination. If you don’t like it, you’re welcome to try to get a Constitutional amendment passed.

To top it all off, the Government of Stephen Harper has endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, which is basically a summary of everything Idle No More has been round dancing about.  If you’ve got a problem with Idle No More’s demands, take it up with Prime Minister Harper.  His government has already endorsed them.

Part Two: Mutterings about what “Equality” is long after I should be in bed

A fact is that Canada has institutionalized inequalities. But the more important fact is that the inequalities have been institutionalized for pragmatic reasons.  The human world is not an equal place, and leaders of Canada since long before Confederation have recognized that fact. They recognized that without recognizing the fact of Quebec’s distinctness, there would be far more discord in the body politic than there has been for the last two centuries. They recognized (but quickly forgot) that the aboriginal peoples constituted a great resource of wisdom, knowledge and (they didn’t forget this bit) land rights for the new provinces.

And, more recently, they’ve realized that there are a multitude of inevitable inequalities in human society and that it is the role of Government to try to even things out a bit. That’s why my daughter gets a check from the government every month even though she’ll likely never pay any taxes or even manage to be gainfully employed. If you don’t like that you’re welcome to imagine the brutal, medieval world we’d live in if society didn’t provide help to its most vulnerable.

Now, I don’t mean to draw a link between my daughter’s disability and the indigenous people of Canada, to suggest that somehow the First Peoples are “handicapped” and we “ought to” help them out of some sort of White Morality. No. Certainly Canada has an obligation to restitution for past wrongs to individuals, such as the Chinese head tax, the Japanese internment and the Residential Schools horror.  Certainly Canada has an obligation to redress past wrongs, such as the destruction of Africville,  the forced sterilization of the intellectually disabled, and the systematic discrimination of the Indian Act.

“Equality” can not realistically mean “We all start at the same point, so we should all be able to get ahead if we simply apply ourselves,”   which is what I fear some critics of Idle No More believe. We manifestly do not all start at the same point. Indeed, no two of us in the entire world start at the same point. I would think that societal equality truly means that every member is enabled to achieve her full potential considering her personal and wider historical and Constitutional starting point.

Idle No More, as I understand the movement,  is about upholding the real Constitutional status and the true historical place of aboriginal Nations, and it is about recognizing all Canadian’s common starting point: The Treaties. In short, Idle No More is precisely about Equality.

And, more importantly, Idle No More is about the water and the air, and about every generation’s equal right to clean water and clean air.

To conclude, if you really want this “equality” you talk about, you’re going to have to ignore history, get a bunch of Constitutional amendments passed, and be prepared to live in a country scattered with physically and intellectually disabled beggars starving in the streets of polluted cities, with rivers and lakes destroyed.

Or maybe you’d really prefer the happier equality Idle No More is demanding for all of us.

Part Three: Links

You want some links to the documents? They’re all right there online. If you’re reading this, you’ve got that google right there, probably up in the right hand corner of your screen. Or you might even be able to highlight and right click or something.  Make an effort, if you really are interested in learning.  Google these documents. Be Idle No More.

I’m going to bed.

Royal Proclamation 1763

Quebec Act 1774

Constitution Act 1982

UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People

Canadian Government endorses UN declaration on rights of indigenous peoples

A little waste-saving trick

Do you use a lot of glue sticks in your art or design work? Are you a scrap-booker? Or maybe you just have a kid who’s an obsessive-compulsive gluer.  Well, here’s a little trick that saves a bit of waste and a tiny bit of money.

I use the generic 20 gram sticks from Staples, but this will probably work with any size or brand.  When the stick gets down to the little plastic ring, I used to just throw it out, but for a while now I’ve been hanging onto them until I have four or five that look like this:

When I’ve got a few “empty” sticks, I sit down with an ordinary kitchen knife, stick it into the bit of glue that’s left and unscrew it from the plastic cup it’s in. The cup is reverse threaded, so you turn it clock-wise to remove the plug of glue. The first time I did it I was pleasantly surprised, and more than a little annoyed at the waste,  to find more than a centimetre of perfectly good glue that was designed to be discarded.

Now I choose one of the sticks to be the re-manufactured one.  I turn the cup down a bit, tuck the plug of glue in, and press it down with the knife, massaging it a bit to fill the voids of the screw thread.  Then I repeat until the re-manufactured stick is full.

I find that four or five “empty” sticks can become a full stick with about three minutes of simple effort.

If your activities involve a lot of gluing and you’re concerned about waste, this little trick can give you a nice little feeling of satisfaction and maybe save a tiny bit of money.  I mean, why buy a half dozen glue sticks and just throw one away unused?

More Idle (no more) thoughts

As I have been a lot lately, I was thinking about Aboriginal issues in Canada today and . . .

I don’t think that it can seriously be denied that at least since the “Gradual Civilization Act” was passed by the Parliament of of the Province of Canada in 1857, Government policy toward First Nations, Metis and Inuit has had the ultimate goal of assimilation, of making surviving aboriginal people into just another Canadian ethnicity.  This was the goal of the Indian Act which took over from the Gradual Civilization act. As Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1913-1934, articulated the policy:

I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department

Assimilation was also, as is well known today, the purpose of what became the genocidal tragedy of the Residential Schools.

And the White Paper of 1969 was explicitly a plan for the rapid assimilation of aboriginal people into “Canadian Society” and for the extinguishment of aboriginal and treaty rights for all time.

But what I was thinking about today is the simple question, “Why?”

Why did successive governments for a century and a half go to all this trouble and expense to set up programs of assimilation?  Surely they could have just sent surveyors into the areas now covered by the numbered treaties. They could have announced that clearing, cultivating and occupying x number of acres would earn a person a title deed to that patch of ground.  They could have simply declared as vagrant anyone who didn’t get to work on farming or migrate to find industrial or commercial employment.

Why did they go through all the mess of treaty negotiation, translation, ceremony, Indian Act, Indian Agents, Residential Schools, Reserves, Royal Commissions, Truth and Reconcilliation . . . ?

I think I know exactly why.

Underlying all the mess is an assumption and an acknowledgement that Aboriginal Title is legitimate and must be dealt with by some means.  The real “Indian Problem” Duncan Campbell Scott was so determined to solve is the “Aboriginal Title Problem”, and it is a “problem” which continues to bedevil governments today.  Both sides have always acknowledged aboriginal title.  Successive governments have proceeded on the assumption that the best way to extinguish aboriginal title is to eliminate the title-holders, preferably by means more quiet than warfare.

Especially since Aboriginal and Treaty Rights were entrenched in the Canadian Constitution in 1982, I believe governments will continue to be bedevilled by assumed and acknowledged aboriginal title until such a time as there is a just agreement on sharing the use and the protection of the land and its resources. This sharing is exactly what the First Nations understood the numbered Treaties to be about.  This sharing is also what the Idle No More movement is all about.

Surely it is clear by now that assimilation of the aboriginal people is a policy doomed to failure.

Canada will more likely be assimilated by the First Nations.

Some might argue Canada has been gradually being assimilated for a few centuries now.

I would argue that the assimilation of Canada should be a long-term goal of Idle No More.

 

If ever more non-natives become Idle No More by coming out to witness and to take part in the joyous celebrations of Aboriginal culture, it won’t take five more centuries to find a peaceful, happy,  final solution to the colonization problem.

Another warm cold day

I really am going to get back to writing about art and literature soon.  Really.  I’ve been reading William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience for the last little bit, so I haven’t had much to say about reading.  In the mean time . . .

I found myself at the University of Alberta this afternoon, intending to join in the almost daily Round Dance here in Edmonton.  That University has a bunch of different buildings from when I went there thirty years ago!  And it’s a whole lot more crowded (with little youngsters) than I remember it.  I found myself sub-vocalizing  David Bowie’s new single, “Where Are We Now?”, which has been making me feel a sort of peacefully melancholy nostalgia for lost time.

The festivities began right on time with polite passing out of information pamphlets to passers by and then an Elder’s prayer from the steps of Pembina Hall, one of the oldest buildings on Campus.  The crowd turned in good order to the four cardinal directions and then proceeded to a sunny position in the main Quad while the drummers and singers received brief instructions on the steps.  It was a good crowd — a couple of hundred, I’d guess.  And it was a very diverse crowd!  There were Canadians of all colours and ages, although university students seemed predominant.   It was nice to see a trio of young women in hijabs giggling as they tried to figure out the steps, old white guys who couldn’t even round dance, and a bunch of First Nations university students.

The drummers and singers were magnificent!  The sun shone down on the bright snow and the laughing faces as we started off in a big ring, holding hands with strangers — now friends.  We circled, unmittened hands warmed by mittened hands to each side. The ring was large enough that it little more than a single round was completed by the time the drumming stopped for the first time.  We all stood in the ring for a moment and then the shout and response was begun my a gentleman I remember from the Kingsway round dance.  It was that timeless old simple and direct one:

“What do we want?

“Justice!”

“When do we want it?”

“Now!”

There were one or two others and then the drums started up again, we circled again happily, and then, in no time we made our way back to the steps of Pembina Hall for bannock and tea, a very nice touch.  As I stood in line with all the other smiling people, I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned around, and there was Phyllis!  After a hug and introductions to friends, she said “I’m goin’ inside to warm up!  See tomorrow at the rally downtown!”

After I got my bannock, I went inside to warm up a moment before the bus ride home.  I stood listening to Phyllis chatting for a bit while toddlers toddled around the lobby of Pembina Hall, grinning as broadly as the adults.  Then I took my leave, feeling that I couldn’t have spent the afternoon in any better way.  And the warmth and happiness has been so lasting that even the nasty comments tacked on to the bottom of online news stories about Idle No More haven’t cooled or saddened me this evening.

I really wish that every Canadian could find it in their heart to take an hour from their day sometime over the next few months to take the hand of the stranger on their left and of the stranger on their right and hear the drums and the singing and connect themselves to all the long generations of this land.

“As long as there’s sun . . . As long as there’s rain . . . As long as there’s fire . . .”

Lester del Rey’s “The Eleventh Commandment”: An Elder Handmaid’s Tale

It’s funny.
I’m not actually a fan of Lester del Rey, but here I am writing about him again.  As a youngster I read very little of his work.  I was all Clarke and Asimov and Larry Niven.  But when I was rereading Nerves a while back this ad on the back cover caught my eye:

The back cover of “Nerves”

and I thought, “The Eleventh Commandment looks interesting, in a schlocky sort of way.”  Through the magic of Abebooks, within a week or two I had a copy of the exact edition advertised in my silly little hands:

The front cover of “The Eleventh Commandment”

What a pleasant surprise this two dollar (ten dollars shipping) book has been!  No, the writing continues to be pedestrian, the plot is perhaps a little contrived at times, the characters are more stock and wooden then  the yard at Totem down on 51st (that’s local, Edmonton colour), but . . .

This is a sort of mainstream, white bread work from 1962 somehow filled with drugged-out orgies in churches, socially sanctioned adultery, and empowered (in an odd way) women.

The Eleventh Commandment has a pretty standard old science fiction plot:  a colonial (from Mars in this case) finds himself exiled to Old Earth and must make a home for himself in this strange new old world.  The Martian, Boyd Jensen, seems like pretty much a typical mid-20th Century American fellow.  The reader is meant to find him familiar, I would think.  Post-nuclear-apocalyptic America, however, is quite different, it seems.  The land is full of fallout remnants, society is ruled by the American Catholic Eclectic Church and the Eleventh Commandment (Be Fruitful and Multiply!), and, we learn, the landscape is dotted with secret orphanages filled with the pitiful products of the mating of the Eleventh Commandment and  radioactivity-induced mutation.  Society is a completely Church-dominated pre-industrial cesspool in which women are indoctrinated to want nothing other than to produce babies until they die and men are similarly (but more easily, one would guess) brainwashed into a desire to father as many children as possible.  There is, however, a fairly clear emphasis in the Catholic Eclectic Church on trying to keep it all within the bounds of marriage, despite the orgies in the underground and Wiccan churches.  The Church wants to keep track of the genealogy of every birth.  As becomes clear at the end, all this breeding is the Catholic Eclectic Church’s eugenic system for purifying the genetically damaged human stock.

We are left with a sort of nausea.  Through the whole book the Church has seemed to be the horrid, psychotic institution bent on forcing women to be baby factories on the basis of ridiculous religious superstition.  Our conviction — cultivated by del Rey — that science needs to enlighten this superstitious world is suddenly overturned.  It isn’t superstition that drives the church — it is science after all!  We end the novel firmly impaled on the horns of the dilemma.  Everything about the lying Church and its horribly logical eugenics is beyond objectionable, but, in the world del Rey has created, is it not the only way to preserve humanity?  We know that Mars, which has been presented as a positive society, deals with its own genetic sports through exile to Earth, most often ending in death soon after arrival.  It is unclear what is happening on Earth outside of North America, but it is safe to assume that the entire globe is contaminated and that maintaining genetic health would be a challenge to any society.  The Church’s plan, to keep the population at a sustainable, if barely, level of development while breeding and selecting out harmful mutations in as few generations as possible, is disturbingly convincing.  But we can’t help but feel that this evil is only slightly the lesser to the alternatives.

The Eleventh Commandment is certainly a product of its time blending Cold War fears with some of the Dangerous Visions — the book is dedicated to Harlan Ellison — about to burst onto the science fiction scene and American society at large in the sixties.  But somehow The Eleventh Commandment seems to me a tale for our time, at least as much as Margaret Atwood’s later and much more famous The Handmaids Tale.  Del Rey shows us a fundamentalist religious society with some noticeable similarities to the perversities of fundamentalists in our own day (Talib, I’m looking at you.) And Father Epstein’s recitation about nature speaks eloquently to our time:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help . . . But there is no help left to the race of man.  The mountains have been stripped of their cover and their substance runs down with the unchecked rains to bury the valleys below.  The buffalo and the wolf are gone from the plains, along with the tough grass that evolved there, and dry dust sweeps like a cutting scythe before the pleasure of the wind.  The puma is missing from his den and the eagle from his lair.  The predators are vanished, and without them the game herds have suckled the weak among their young to bring forth more weak, until their gene pools have failed and even they are dead or dying. . .

Father Epstein continues to describe the accidental nuclear catastrophe as being the only thing that could have saved humanity from its own relentless, unthinking growth.  If not for the nuclear holocaust, there would have been a population and environmental apocalypse.  No alternative in del Rey’s imagined future is a pleasant one.

All in all, Lester del Rey’s The Eleventh Commandment must be termed a hidden gem of mid-20th century science fiction, well worth seeking out by students of feminism, religion, environmentalism and the rights of the disabled.

I just stubbed my toe: Needles, pain, donating blood and being a grown up

I’ll be brief.

I donate blood at the lovely Edmonton location of Canadian Blood Services every 56 days or thereabouts.

I keep my vaccinations up to date.

The Kid has regular (weekly at the moment) blood work done and has had a tragic number of IVs in her life (with never a whimper and always displaying a joyful fascination for the process).  For a while I had to inject nasty stuff into her thigh once a week.

Believe me, I know and understand what a needle feels like, both the little vaccination ones and the big broken-golf-club-shafts they use for blood donations.

What I don’t understand is why some grown up people whimper and blanch at the very thought of a little pin prick from a nurse, and this, in part, is why I don’t understand:

I just stubbed my toe!

Barefoot, I was coming up the stairs with the laundry and, to use skiing parlance (and to bring back dark childhood memories of a bad
afternoon on the slopes near the village of Sundridge, Ontario)  I caught a tip, in this case the tip of the second toe on my right foot, on the sharp, terra cotta edge of a Mexican paver.

I bled.

I nearly fainted.

Seriously, the needle pricks required for a vaccination, routine blood work, or even blood donation are as nothing — are positively orgasmically pleasurable — compared to the agony brought on by a good toe stubbing.

All you pale-faced adults who turn to jelly when a needle bearing nurse approaches . . .

Suck it up, you wimps!

If you’ve stubbed your toe once in your life, you’ve already survived the pain of a thousand needles and more.

Suck it up!  And just to prove that you’re not a little baby, go make a blood donation!

I’m eligible again June 2.

I expect to see a whole lot of people sucking it up — not whimpering — and being grown-ups saving peoples lives with the simplest of sacrifices.

Initial thought

Ill-understood polysyllabic vocabulary has replaced well-ordered syntax as the hallmark of a highbrow.