The drive from Vancouver along the Coquihalla Highway is truly one of the wonders of the world. The ruggedness of the mountains: the power of the rivers, the denseness of the trees. I do love being back in Canada. I especially love the familiar voices on the CBC radio station.
As I drove along through this breath-taking highway, I listened to a program about the First Nations People here. Even that name: First Nations. There is so much pride there. After spending so much time with the Aboriginal people in Australia, it was a sharp contrast for me. I had forgotten how proud so many of our Indigenous people are.
First of all, they started by defining time as pre and post ‘contact’. They greeted the Europeans as a different, but equal culture. They understood that the environment was new, and really tried to help the new comers settle in.
“We welcomed the Europeans as friendly visitors to our home. We didn’t realize that their perspective regarding land rights would be so different than ours.”
First Nations people of North America are very communal. They believe the ‘creator’ is the only true landowner. I had heard that before, but hadn’t really though about how this view point affected settlement.
Canadian First Nations people also come largely from a warrior culture. They were always fighting other native groups that saw land ownership the same way they did: enormous land areas to wander about hunting and living as they wish. Canada is a huge place, and it belonged to everyone! Until contact with Europeans, they had never came upon a culture that divided and owned the land. As a result they have struggled for hundreds of years with the European system… and are still fighting for land rights.
They are fighting. We want them to negotiate nicely and they get very unreasonable: in our opinion. They want the whole country back!
But what we don’t seem to get is that they want it back to share. We want to get them to agree to small areas, created fairly and marked out on a map, dependent on the number of people and how we see their needs.
In our culture, we are being more than fair.
In their culture, we are lousy visitors.
In central Australia things are a little different.
Contact is referred to as ‘the invasion’. And in areas where I was, it is a fairly recent event.
The people are not warriors. They were hunter-gatherers that were able to spread themselves out over large areas, mainly because there weren’t a lot of them. The challenge was survival and they fought the environment: a harsh desert with more poisonous snakes and spiders than any other place in the world. They had no corn to cultivate. No animals to domesticate.
Today, they see themselves as victims of an invasion, and cower like an abused puppy.
They want, and at this point need, to be taken care of by the Australian government. Survival requires that they be ‘held’ like a parent cares for a child, and the current government does not have strong parenting skills.
In their culture too though, we are lousy visitors.
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