One step toward aboriginal development in Canada

[Aerich]

Like many countries colonized in the last 400 years, Canada's record in relations with indigenous peoples is a poor one. At present, the aboriginal demographic in this country shows widespread poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and substance abuse at unacceptable levels, particularly in the western and northern regions of the country. It is a large problem for a country that prides itself on its living conditions and tolerance of many cultures. Much of the time, aboriginal peoples are neglected or otherwise ignored because they have little power and frankly, because their situation is too complex to be solved easily and cheaply.

The legal system, heavily influenced by the British system, is one of the areas in which Canada's aboriginal people are under-represented. There is some hope for change, as evidenced by a number of initiatives to provide access to legal and other education.

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First Nunavut law class graduates on Aborginal Day

CBC News
National Aboriginal Day became a special occasion for the first graduates of a new law school program in Nunavut.

Their graduation ceremony in Iqaluit on Tuesday was attended by Nunavut Premier Paul Okalik and Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.

In total there were 11 graduates. If they eventually pass their bar exams, Canada's newest territory will have 12 Inuit lawyers, including the premier.

"This is a quantum change and a huge step toward righting the awful imbalance of Inuit involvement in the legal system of Nunavut," Clarkson told the assembly.

The Akitsiraq Law School was a partnership between the University of Victoria and Nunavut Arctic College. Law professors from across the country flew to Iqaluit to teach courses.

For many students, going to a law school outside Nunavut was just out of the question. "I would have had to enrol my children in different schools because they are all at different levels. And having to go through that would have been totally impossible for me," said Aaju Peters, who has five children.

Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murphy says leaving Nunavut would mean leaving behind her culture and language. "The North doesn't always have to go to the South and operate on southern standards. Southern standards can come to the North and be alive here and be enriched by us," she said.

The students are starting jobs across the country, including one graduate who got a job as a clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Akitsiraq was intended as a one-time program, but there have been discussions about offering it again.

[Lucern]

Thanks Aerich.

Except for the whole progress part, this sounds suspiciously familiar.

It's interesting that among these populations worldwide, poor social indicators aren't unusual, and underrepresentation is almost assured. Make no mistake though, some have better social indicators in less developed countries than most of the rest of those societies. The Shuar (of head-shrinking fame) of Venezuela have a great PR sense, and they make sure that local indignities become international problems for Venezuela. The same goes for some Brazilian Amazonian groups. A couple hundred tribesmen demonstrating and Sting showing up when you're trying to flood a good portion of the Amazon basin with a hydroelectric dam creates quite a problem. The Bolivian indigenous population is even (sometimes) the most powerful political faction of that nation.

Is aboriginal the preferred term there, by the way?

[Aerich]

Yes. Aboriginal/indigenous is in, native is out.

The power of indigenous groups is often measured in population numbers and connections. In Canada, as in the US, there hasn't been as much population mixing between aboriginals and non-aboriginals as in, say, most Central and South American countries. Might have to look at the influence of railroads and the subsequent ease of mass immigration as a cause. In any event, probably at least 50-70% of the South American population has significant (say 1/8 or more) indigenous heritage, whereas the percentage of North Americans (excluding Mexicans) who can claim the same amount is probably much less than 10%.

Another difference is that the US and Canada have dealt with their aboriginal people via a reserve/reservation system - where aboriginals have been concentrated on a relatively small portion of land (compared to their historical territory, that is - many reservations are fairly large) administered by the federal government. Not only does this approach discourage intermarriage, it also isolates aboriginals from making connections with powerful people (businesspeople, politicians) and becoming powerful people in their own right in the dominant culture. To be fair, many aboriginal people discourage close connections with the dominant culture, hoping that their youth may be less inclined to give up their cultural ties if a measure of cultural isolation is preserved.

Edit: clarity

[ 06-24-2005, 01:54 PM: Message edited by: Aerich ]

[Lucern]

Here 'Native American' is common, but indigenous is more useful. "Indian" is definately out, though I do still hear it.

I'd like to have solid data on the demographics of the US/Canada vs Latin America (defined as Mexico - Argentina), but what you say seems credible. I'd place the difference as a result of Spanish/Portuguese colonization being different from French/English. What the difference is I couldn't tell you. My guess is that the Spanish were after the "Three G's - Gold, God, and Glory" at first, meaning they weren't sending waves of settlers, rather militant conquistadores. After the gold and glory was had, more Spanish must have come, but there was still a great effort to convert what was left of indigenous populations*. This not only shows that they were actively bringing them into the cultural fold (whether they meant to or just wanted to 'save' as many as possible), but they had missions where indigenous and interloper lived together.

Of course that's just heresay lol.

I think you're right about the effect of the reservations on what was already a pretty distant relationship before it came to that. This is evidenced by a similar situation in South America. Here you have sheer geographic isolation acting similarly to government designated reservations. The Aymara of the Andes were pretty isolated, and the same goes for every group that lived in the Amazon rainforest. Geographic isolation allows the group to maintain self-sufficiency and autonomy long after other groups have already been displaced, until that fateful day that they're discovered, diseased, and slowly withered away by their youth wanting to see the world away from home. With the societies awaiting those youth in most cases, I can't see the comforts of 'civilization' being worth the loss of identity, especially the tiny sliver of those comforts they'll most likely see in commercial ranches or urban squatter settlements that so many end up in. My point is that you won't see a politically powerful Mundurucu or Yanomamo population except where they use their indigenous status to their advantage. The numbers just aren't there, nor could these groups comprise much of the overall indigenous heritage of a population.

Even where populations can claim high percentages of indigenous heritage, I've seen repeated examples of status being linked to heritage, but the heritage of the Spanish/Portuguese(and rarely, French) is always favored over indigenous or African slave heritage. A cheap facsimile of this is of course skin color. Even where indiginous heritage is obviously part of most of a society, it can still be a political minority.

*I've read/heard/been lectured that it's quite possible that smallpox and other diseases killed around 90% of the "New World' population. It's also possible that many, if not most, tribes encountered in North America were remnants of older groups that we'll really never know about, banded together for defense, and probably only 150 or so years old by the time the European settlers arrived. I also read that it's possible that they gave syphilis back to Europe though. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Aerich]

Yes, there was definitely a difference in colonization theory between Spain and the French/English. Spain had better luck with gold, but other nations were looking for other things, including ways to relieve the population pressure.

The skin colour thing is weird. I've heard from people who were recently in Hong Kong and India (and seen a couple news articles) that pale skin is "in" there, to the extent that people use skin whiteners, etc. Kind of the reverse of the tanning trend over here.

From what I've read, a figure of 90% dead from European diseases is probably close, but a little overstated. It was different for each tribe, of course. The Mandan Indians were wiped out by 1860 or so, and some tribes managed to resist better than others. But according to archaeological data and oral tradition from around here (Pacific Northwest), it's considered that at least 80% of the population died out, which is why there wasn't more fighting. Exposure to disease carried by fur traders and gold miners occurred decades before there was much settler presence in the region.

[Lucern]

That's interesting about relieving population pressure. It makes absolute sense that Europe had been teetering on its upper limit, no doubt a contributor to the Black Death a couple of centuries prior. I hadn't heard about that yet.

It's also good to hear the Canadian perspective on what I mostly read from a US and/or Central/South American perspective. The Mandan aren't a group I'm familiar with.

As for skin color, I heard those exact things about India. This simply evidences, imo, that race, a concept that has no firm basis in biology, is a changing social fiction. Cosmetic change to skin tone seemed like a trendy thing rather than a subversion of social status at first, but now I'm thinking that trendy things are indicators of self-identity and social status anyway. Alternately, we could take the sociobiology interpretation that would indicate that physical variation from the majority of the population makes an individual more appealing to the opposite sex, like dark hair in a Scandinavia full of blondes. I like the first one better, just wanted to throw that out there.

It may be true that the 90% is numerically overstated as an overall death toll from those diseases. I think it is true, however, for the Aztecs, since they had cities, including one as big as any in Europe, if not larger. I think European diseases' role in limiting two continents worth of peoples' capacities to maintain autonomy, though, cannot be overstated. In Jarod Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which are stated as three definitive advantages for Europeans in their conquest of the 'New World', I can't help but think that the guns and the steel are hardly worth mentioning compared to germs in the early stages of colonization (the one that killed most of the indigenous population in my estimation) Guns, which may have been scary at first, were insignificantly better than any other weaponry against non-armored targets, and probably much worse due to their inaccuracy and slow rate of fire. Steel...fine for armor and weapons, but it's not as if the wide array of indigenous weapons, like an Aztec obsidian blade (which could easily sever a limb) weren't effective killing tools. It's also not as if any colonial power fielded an army large enough to have taken on that other 80-90% of the population's soldiery. And it's especially not true that the Europeans fielded better military leaders than their counterparts. The Aztecs, by the way, have been demonstrated to have traded with groups in the American southwest. Where there's trade, there's contact. Where there was contact, there was death. It's really a question of who they had contact with, and who had contact with them. Isolation would have been the key to resistance in the 1500's, but a liability if they were 'discovered' after the first wave of smallpox (and the rest). The 10-20% survivors would have been largely immune to, and possibly carriers of, any number of those diseases.

I know you're a student of history (among other things), but you should consider anthropology if you get a chance. You'd do quite well. Or maybe not, since you seem to know enough of the same things I do lol. In any case, it's been a pleasure [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Aerich]

A bit of history on the Mandans, who lived in what became the US, btw, near the Missouri River.

Source

"In the earliest historical accounts the Mandan were firmly established in stationary villages in the neighborhood of the Heart River. Verendrye says they were a large and powerful nation and feared none of their neighbors. Their manufactures were almost necessities among the other tribes, and in trade they were able to dictate their own terms. Their forts were well fortified. The smallest village he visited had one hundred and thirty houses. Verendrye's son visited one of the larger villages, declared that it was twice as large. There were at least one thousand houses in several villages. Lewis and Clark declared that in the two villages of one hundred huts there were three hundred and fifty warriors. At this rate there should have been at least fifteen thousand Mandan in 1738 dwelling prosperously in large and well-fortified towns. (Will, Spinden, p. 99).

The Mandan had created an focal point of trade on the Missouri River. All of the plains tribes came to barter for agricultural good and products. Called the "Marketplace of the Central Plains", the Mandan established what was to be the forerunner of trading posts that came later to the area. There is little information for the next sixty-six years. The Mandan prospered and grew powerful up to 1772."
...
The description given by Lewis and Clark agrees with the conditions two years later when Henry visited them [Alexander Henry, a Northwest Company fur trader]. In 1837, smallpox attacked them again, raged for many weeks and left only one hundred and twenty-five survivors. The Mandan's were taken in by the Arikara, with whom they intermarried. They separated, again forming a small village of their own at Fort Berthold. In 1850 there were three hundred and eighty- five Mandan, largely of mixed blood, living. There are only a few of the full-blooded Mandan left. The culture has changed, the language has changed, and as a nation the Mandan are practically extinct. (Will, Spinden, p. 101). In 1700, the entire section of the Missouri from the Cannonball to the mouth of the Yellowstone was occupied by groups of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Crow. The largest villages were near the mouth of Heart River. The Nuptadi and Nuitadi bands were living on both banks of the Missouri."

Note that the Mandan were a powerful trading nation, meaning much contact with disease carriers, a point you made above. By the time of Lewis and Clark, they were much reduced as a nation by smallpox, and were all but wiped out by another epidemic.

It's very difficult to tell what statistical effect disease had on indigenous peoples, mostly because there are no accurate population figures for their bands, never mind an account of how many died from disease. The practical effect, however, was catastrophic, as is the consensus among historians and related disciplines. Debate about the actual percentage over all of the New World is just something to do when no better debate is around, because it's one of those historical things that cannot be proved by documentary evidence.

[ 06-25-2005, 12:52 AM: Message edited by: Aerich ]