FW: "No simple solutions to native problems"

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

Of concern to Aboriginal and descent people in Canada,

Ric Dolphin is the new Western Bureau Chief of the Calgary Herald. Currently

he is on a tour of the West and below you will find an article which is most

insulting, ignorant and racist. Although this sort of racist rhetoric is
upsetting, it's not shocking considering it's coming from a columnist who
used to write for the Alberta Report magazine which is basically liscenced
to write hate. Indeed the Calgary Herald has a most questionable ethics and
journalistic integrity when it comes to writing about Aboriginal and other
social issues.

The Calgary Herald and Ric Dolphin must know it is unacceptable to treat
First Nations/Aboriginal people this way. I encourage you to voice your
opinion by writing a letter to the editor, to/and the Calgary Herald to/and
Ric Dolphin.

In the Spirit of the Truth,

Joshua Fraser

===========
Calgary Herald                      Tuesday, June 11, 2002

PG A9

"No simple solutions to native problems"
RIC DOLPHIN - In Edmonton

Whenever I traveled during my recent sweep across the West, there always
seemed to be a place nearby where there were cars on blocks, paint peeling
from the clapboard and lot of people of working age who weren't.

Many Canadian instantly recognize these nests of hopelessness as Indian
reserves. They are a legacy of our well-meaning forbears who believe they
were being humane when they gave the conquered tribes a place to call their
own.

The road to hell, as we know, is well populated by missionaries, social
workers and those other well-intentioned folk who are sure they are doing
the humane thing. But if the current plight of the Indians isn't proof of
misguided charity, I don't know what is.

On my trip, whenever the subject of the local native came up, be it the
Nootka on Vancouver Island, the Cree of Winnipeg, or the Blackfoot of
southern Alberta - voices would be lowered and the same line of argument
would ensue.

Treaty Indians receive billions of dollars a year in aid, their food,
housing, university, college, and medicine is free; they pay no taxes; they
can hunt and fish whenever they want to: and they are accorded special
treatment by the courts, the schools and employers.

Despite all of this largesse - okay, probably because of it - their society
is in shambles. Rates of addiction to alcohol, cocaine, gambling, glue are
eight to 10 times the norm.

Birthrates, encouraged by child welfare benefits, are three times the
non-Indian level and the progeny are typically fathered by several men,
usually absent.

A disproportionate number of native children are born with fetal alcohol
syndrome, a condition that predisposes them to not working or to the
drug-oriented criminal world. The number of Indian youth in the gang-central

city of Winnipeg, increases by 20 per cent every year.

Unemployment in the native population everywhere hovers between 60 and 80
per cent. And although they constitute six per cent of the general
population, Indians account for 43 per cent of the social work caseload and
50 per cent of the prison population.

Still, their leaders - left-wing lawyers, for the most part, trained in arts

of grievance and entitlement - clamour for more.  More land, more programs,
more free this and free that for ever and ever amen.

For all of the problems faced by the aboriginals are, say these professional

apologists, the result of white oppression and racist policies.

Many of the people I talked to about this in the West, from the mayors of
the cities, the drivers of the taxis and the cops on the beat would -off the

record - provided a succinct, one-word response to such contentions. It
begins with bull and you know how it ends.

That Indians have everyone to blame but themselves for their predicament may

still currency among the CBC classes and the social workers who numbers are
bolstered by failure. But those of us without the vested interests or the
inclination to wallow in the delicious collective guilt are beginning to
wonder who our politicians lack the guts to do what is necessary.

"Have you been along Main Street?" the 23-year-old University of Manitoba
political science student asked me as she served me supper in the Winnipeg
restaurant where she worked to pay her tuition (something a native student
wouldn't need to do).

"It's like the Third World. That's what the politicians should be dealing
with right now, but you know they won't."

A Chinese-Canadian friend of mine in Edmonton, whose parents suffered a
discrimination similar to that of their native contemporaries, nonetheless
managed to rise from dishwasher to multimillionaire restaurateur.

He hunts and fishes with some of his friends from the nearby Enoch Band, a
once oil-rich community that squandered its royalties and now believes a
subsidized casino is its ticket to prosperity. The restaurateur had been
approached to invest, but says he would never do business with the natives.

"They have no concept of money is," he says. "It's always been something
that they've had given them, with no risk or effort. Getting it, losing it,
what does it matter? They're not getting any of my money."

His solution to the Indian problem - and it's the biggest problem that the
West currently faces - is a giant payoff.

"Right now we're paying, what, $20,000 a year for every man, woman and
child? Okay you give'em each, I don't care, $100,000. And that's it. No more

reserves, no more tax exemption, no more treaty status - and they have to
buy hunting and fishing licences like the rest of us."

In five years, the outlay would have been covered by the current annual
federal expenditure on Indian welfare. After that, we'd have an extra $8 to
$9 billion a year to put against the national debt.

I heard versions of this payoff scheme from people throughout the West - my
favourite version had the province of Saskatchewan being handed over
holus-bolus to the country's natives.

There is a seductive simplicity to such concepts. But simple solutions have
never been they style in a country ruled by lawyers and bureaucrats whose
livelihoods depend on complexity.

Instead we get more programs, more social workers, more crowded jails and
the promotion of the belief that a re-infusion of native culture - healing
circles, folklore in the schools, etc. - will somehow fix the problems of a
people who are being spoiled rotten already.

The latest scheme is the Klein government's plan to allow casinos, on
reserves - a policy that bears some resemblance to the whisky trading of
yore. But more on that next time.

"Opinion differs on solution to native woes (2nd Article)"

RIC DOLPHIN
Calgary Herald

Thursday, June 13, 2002

In what has apparently become a notorious column in Tuesday's Herald, I
expressed the opinion Canada's natives have been spoiled by too much
government money and not enough responsibility for their fate.

I received a lot of e-mail.

A University of Calgary Blackfoot student wrote: "Only racists like you
would see the bad. As for handouts, we were the first people here and if you

are so bitter sitting behind your desk on your fat (butt) and (complaining)
about money, just think of it as rent."

A Calgary financier opined: "When I read your article, quite frankly, I was
shocked at your blatant honesty, and disregard to the nauseating ongoing
political correctness that goes hand in hand with any 'dialogue' on native
issues. Very few public officials and journalists have the moral character
to ask the tough questions and point out some of the obvious root problems
plaguing Native people (and taxpayers)."

These two responses reflect the growing gulf of opinion as another $7
billion is spent each year on what appears to we mere stupi-doops as the
perpetuation of a ridiculous situation.

I do not, as some suggested, harbour antipathy toward natives. If it isn't
racist to express this opinion, I'd say that I like most native individuals.

Whether Salish, Blackfoot or Cree, they've always struck me as being more
open, more humorous and generally freer of the pretensions and poses of a
starchy white Canada increasingly controlled by the harridans of the Supreme

Court.

I remember I once asked Clifford Freeman, chief of the poor Driftpile
reserve near Lesser Slave Lake, how it was that the tribal council could
justify employing more than 100 people when most villages of 800 get by on
less than a quarter of that.

He just chuckled and said: "Because we're more creative."

Which, in a phrase, illustrates one of the things that I like about natives
-- the laconic humour. But it also illustrates what it is that makes me, the

Calgary financier and, I'd venture, the silent majority of Canadians so
angry.

Governments give the native communities what most of us must work for. And
many natives, having received welfare for so long it seems an entitlement,
display a cavalier disregard for where the money comes from.

When we complain these are our taxes and they are obviously being spent
unwisely, we are accused of being racists with big butts who are incapable
of appreciating the enormity of the crimes of our great-grandfathers.

As a lady from southern Ontario wrote: "Here's a thorough title for your
next article: 'Our great-grandfathers murdered approximately one million
Native people, hundreds of tribes and put the rest on small plots of
worthless land, took their children and placed them in residential schools
where they were sexually, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually
abused.' "

My great-grandfathers weren't even in the country at the time. If they had
been, they'd be long dead now and the concept of inherited sin wouldn't
apply to me because I'm not Catholic.

And, as for sexual, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual abuse, I would

submit there is a lot more of that on today's reserves and skid rows than
ever there was in the residential schools.

Reading the classic 1940 work The Plains Cree: An Ethnographic, Historical
and Comparative Study, by anthropologist David Mandelbaum, I suggest a fair
bit of that sort of thing also occurred in the traditional native setting.

I would advise those in the Dolphin-is-a-racist-white-swine camp not to
fret. This is Canada, where conventional liberal thought rules and the
endless gravy train will not likely be derailed by a single columnist.

I talked to several Alberta MLAs on Wednesday who expressed support for my
Tuesday opinions, but they wouldn't dare voice such sacrilege in open
caucus.

For theirs, like the one in Ottawa, is a government ruled by a single
powerful leader. And Ralph Klein, since his time on the Siksika reserve as a

TV reporter in the 1970s, has become a friend and protector of Alberta's
natives.

In 1996, the same year as he was made honorary Chief Rides-Across-the-River
by the Blood band, Klein promised Alberta's natives they would be allowed to

have casinos. It appears these licensed gambling emporia could soon appear
on Alberta's reserves.

Although I said I would deal with this phenomenon today, I spoke -- as some
might have predicted -- with forked tongue. We'll take a look at this latest

dip in the uneven playing field on Saturday.

==========
E-mail Ric Dolphin at: dolphinR@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Letters to the Editor
E-mail: letters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Fax: (403) 235-7379

Mail: Calgary Herald
Letters to the Editor
P.O. Box 2400, Stn. M
Calgary, AB
T2P 0W8


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