GeraldR

I'm a white guy but I can't tolerate the white bread take on this. First, recall that white guys made up the rules and they were so hot on the notion of racial purity that they rewrote them more than a few times. The main purpose of the rules was to create a barrier between First Nations and European people so that: 1) they were more easily prosthelytized (easy pickings for the church - note reserves were even granted to specific denominations), 2) there would be less chance of interbreeding with Europeans i.e. to preserve European racial purity 3) to keep the children of 'country wives' away from European society, 4) to keep 'Indians' from becoming over educated. The rules are based on two basic premises: 1) 'Indians' are an inferior race to whites, 2) women are inferior to men. To be sure the rules have a racist overtone, i.e. white racist, but the racist/misogynist white guys who made them have chosen not to change them (don't expect Harper to do it). BTW: we whites in Canada made similar arrangements for orientals and blacks. Maybe I'm not surprised that there is no sense of shame.

'Let all the things that live in the swamp hatch out' There's much more 'joy' to be had: 1) for the first period in history, first nations are able to access due process of law on an equal basis to all citizens 2) in many cases, governments and individual actors engaged in various kinds of fraudulent and illegal activity in their dealings with first nations people 3) for many decades, the fed imposed a defacto moratorium on legal actions by first nations supposedly only related to land claims but generally used by the fed to suppress pretty much anything they wanted to 4) governments frequently employed dishonest and/or incompetent agents and employees 5) the fed and to some extent the Ontario government kept changing course often abrogating previous agreements 6) the current government continues to ignore legal and/or regulatory requirements in their dealing with first nations. 7) the Ontario government has a long tradition of resorting to the 'theory of discovery' as a principle 8) both fed and provinces applied made-up terms and definitions to work around rules and regulations (some patently foolish) 9) a good deal of fed and provincial policy was based on the concept of privilege for 'pure' European citizens 10) governments frequently failed to distinguish between one first nation and another (they even worked on the assumption that some innuit living in Quebec were 'Indians') There is a huge backlog of missteps and misdeeds and dealing in bad faith still to be accounted for; worse, because of (3) they have been allowed to steep until (1) happened (no one ever suspected they were only making things worse in the long run). Some of the stupidity that went on may continue to haunt us; for example, they imposed an interpretation that only those that cleared land could obtain title mainly as a means of preventing 'Indians' from obtaining title. This created at least a few problems: first, there were quite a few Europeans with land titles that never improved the land but much later sold it on - illegally as they didn't meet the requirement for title; second, some first nations people were effective agriculturalists and had to be deprived of title by some flimsy excuse such as their presence was disruptive to European society; third, in spite of agricultural success, they gave away title to others because 'Indians' were just not as efficient farmers (in some cases where they outperformed European farmers, the fed just banned them from buying more farm equipment). Bad faith dealing is one thing; stupidity is another; neither singly or in combination provides much of a legal defense. In Ontario, things are more messed up because the province and the fed frequently shifted issues back and forth and for a while the province of Quebec was in the loop until no one can honestly say what the resolution was if any. There were quite a few cases of dragging things out until one or more parties died (presumably, the notion of an estate was not contemplated). One thing I've come to understand is that First Nations (or Indians) is a plural: this seems obvious but a surprisingly large portion of government policy and actions completely ignored this detail. Yet another bone for lawyers to chew on.