Is that a surprise to anyone?
Also, I'm not sure if comparing the First Nations to African Americans is the correct comparison. I'd guess that Native populations in the US do significantly worse than the African American. But I don't have an intuitive sense of how large the First Nations population is.
It seems basically problematic to say "us" to mean "the white Canadian populace" in a story about Canada's having a race problem.
2, 3: You're welcome, Canada.
Related, Jeet Heer on strategic boringness.
We did a family trip on the trans-Canada railroad when I was a teen. Going through one of the native/First Nations area in Western Ontario, the conductor told us to stay away from the window because people routinely shot at the train. And, sure enough, there were a bunch of shots fired at the train. It was certainly more exciting than the stunningly boring landscape of Saskatchewan or the Canadian Shield.
7: Halford is 140 years old? Surely people didn't routinely shoot at passing trains in 1970s/80s Canada.
The over-all point shouldn't be news to anyone, but always is. It's a subject in which liberals, on both sides of the boarder and typically better-informed than their opponents on most issues, tend to be rather low-information.
I agree that racism in Canada is a problem, but not as serious a problem as people who publish articles using center justification.
9: Unsurprisingly, AIM didn't/doesn't recognize the US/Canada border as particularly relevant.
9 -- yes, but I have the sexual vigor of a 120-year-old.
12 I don't know, but it seems to me that the border was as relevant to Leonard Peltier and John Graham as to Sitting Bull.
I spent a few months in my southern Ontario hometown a couple years ago and witnessed several shocking examples of racism toward black people in that time. They were worse than anything I ever witnessed personally when living in NYC (I stress "personally").
And it's open season wrt comments about First Nations people in Canada. Your average white Canadian is enormously unsympathetic.
14 fair enough, my point was that resistance was not confined to the US, see cache creek 1973.
4: Sure. I imagine the writer is speaking to an "us" in certain provinces and not others.
I took "us" to be the putative readership of Macleans
I don't think so. It's speaking to Canadians (white ones), like so:
How are we not choking on these numbers? For a country so self-satisfied with its image of progressive tolerance, how is this not a national crisis? Why are governments not falling on this issue?
Possibly it is because our Fergusons are hidden deep in the bush, accessible only by chartered float plane: 49 per cent of First Nations members live on remote reserves. Those who do live in urban centres are mostly confined to a few cities in the Prairies. Fewer than 40,000 live in Toronto, not even one per cent of the total population of the Greater Toronto Area. Our racial problems are literally over the horizon, out of sight and out of mind.
Or it could be because we simply do not see the forest for trees. We are distracted by the stories of corrupt band councils, or flooded reserves, or another missing Aboriginal woman. Some of us wring our hands, and a handful of activists protest.
Oh. And possibly that is the putative readership of Macleans.
I'd include myself among the putes.
For years after we emigrated, my family kept subscribing to Macleans and to Saturday Night. It was how I experienced the Trudeau years, supplemented by visits that never lasted more than a couple of weeks. When I left Lester B. Pearson had only been PM a short time.
But that superficial take, succeeded for a while in the 90s and 00s by shortwave broadcasts from RCI until those went away, was supplemented by two other sources: literary novels, where Canada punches above its weight and which are often set in or begin in the recent past, and my dad's stories of the St. Lawrence Valley in NB and NS before the war. He worked and lived among Canadian blacks, Mik Maks—the local FN, among the poorest people in Canada—and the immigrant coal miners. I grew up with a grasp of that mean and bitter society.
Maclean's strikes me as right wing and unsympathetic to First Nations issues whenever I read it, so the headline made me suspicious, and I had the same take as 4 -- what do you mean "we", Maclean's? Even saying "Canada has a race problem" makes me grouchy with its vagueness. The problems referred to in the article are the result of a genocide. "Canada has a genocide problem" is not a headline Maclean's is going to print, but it would have been more specific.
And it's open season wrt comments about First Nations people in Canada. Your average white Canadian is enormously unsympathetic.
My sister-in-law is like this. She was born in Poland though. I guess it's her way of assimilating.
It's not like this is something that is papered over, though -- the issue of First Nations in Canada is extremely complex structurally. It has legal ramifications that simply do not exist in the United States around African Americans. Canadians are sick to death of considering issues like this with Quebec already; and Quebec was a single entity that could be negotiated with. First Nations are not.
You'll notice that the article didn't actually propose any solutions at all -- that's because neither side of the issue, First Nation nor Federal/Provincial Canada, has any to propose.
This was just in my FB feed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POXu1fl3Zwg#t=41
A great song in any language.
I suspect that the First Nations do have solutions to the "being treated like shit and not having any money" problem but that white Canada dislikes them because it would involve (a) not treating indigenous Canadians like shit and (b) giving them money.
Canadians are sick to death of considering issues like this with Quebec already; and Quebec was a single entity that could be negotiated with. First Nations are not.
That would be Canadians other than the Quebecois and First Nations?
That was supposed to be Third, not This. Stupid phone.
The problematics of "we" and collective identity stipulated, that article was a big step for Maclean's (which is shall we say not exactly a rag known for penetrating racial analysis), and did get people talking.
Winnipegers of course objected to their portrayal therein. And of course it's the wrong comparison; a really good article would have, say, compared multiple minority groups on both sides of the border at least. But it had a certain zeitgeist-catching craftiness to it in that aboriginal issues are at least vaguely churning in the Canadian gut due to Idle No More, the missing and murdered aboriginal women controversy, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and various other headline-catching events. And so naturally it is a moment for a fuck-ton of (mostly) white Canadians to talk blithely in other people's hearing about Natives in a fashion indeed not unlike your hardcore Southern racists talking about "niggers" and expecting to have their viewpoint confirmed. And for not so much of a fuck-ton of other (mostly) white Canadians to belatedly wonder what the fuck is going on here, as you don't even need to be extraordinarily racially enlightened to do.
So on the whole, point to Maclean's. Good rewind.