In aboriginal affairs, negotiation is a two-way street

This isn't the U.S. where war was declared on natives and entire nations were force-marched to new "reservations" thousands of kilometres away. Canada's government met with native leaders and negotiated agreements. At the time, it must have seemed like a good deal to native leaders. Native bands traded land they needed to laboriously hunt and gather from in exchange for food and money that would arrive reliably. It was a free ticket to easy-street. If the leaders who signed those treaties could look forward to today, they'd probably feel pretty happy with themselves. Famine is no longer a fear for their people. Those leaders led in far tougher times than today. What we see as a basic right (i.e. not starving) was a major coup for them.

The case can be made that the government representatives knew the long-term value of those lands better than native leaders did. In this sense, the deals can be seen as a swindle, but not theft. In some cases, native bands have claimed that the terms negotiated and passed down in their own oral history differ from those written down at the negotiations. This is a case of the word of their dead elders (as passed down in oral history) against against the governments' dead representatives word (written down at the time of the treaty's signing), which is part of why some court cases drag on for decades.

Today, treaty obligations of the government are a tiny subset of what the government does for its citizens, and it would be a travesty if the government decided to restrict what if offered to natives to what was negotiated a century ago. Take education for example. Only some native bands negotiated for education. Many did not want it. However, to refuse some natives the same quality of education that other Canadians receive would be an abhorrent thing. Bill C-33 was a huge step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it is the chiefs of the AFN who are denying their own children a good education.

Grumbling about swindles that may or may not have happened a hundred years ago is not going to secure much needed funding for schools. Native reservations are going to lag behind the rest of Canada until natives get mad at their own leaders and do something. It's utterly flabbergasting to me that C-33 was so roundly criticized when it was such an immense improvement. How can native parents not be mad at their leaders right now?

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