There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can’t remember the promises that got them elected.
You know what they say. If at first you don’t succeed, try the same thing again. Sometimes the effort is called persistence and is the mark of a strong will. Sometimes it’s called perseveration and is a sign of immaturity. For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behavior is called... policy.
History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They’re not chosen by chance. By and large, the stories are about famous men and celebrated events. We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not out of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment.
Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? – Lee Maracle, Ravensong.
Why do we ask the important questions after they’ve been answered?
History is the stories we tell about the past.
For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behaviour is called... policy.
To be sure, they have had the occasional success, but there is little chance that North America will develop a functional land ethic until it finds a way to overcome its irrational addiction to profit.
The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives in our terms.
More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.
This is a Christian world, you know. We only kill things that are useful or things we don’t like.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be displeased with the ‘environmental ethics’ we have or the ‘business ethics’ or the ‘political ethics’ or any of the myriad of other codes of conduct suggested by our actions. After all, we’ve created them. We’ve created the stories that allow them to exist and flourish. They didn’t come out of nowhere. They didn’t arrive from another planet.
No one knows for sure how many Native children wound up at residential schools in the United States. Canada reckons their own numbers at about 150,000, so the tally for America would have been considerably higher. But for the children who did find themselves there, the schools were, in all ways, a death trap. Children were stripped of their cultures and their languages. Up to 50 percent of them lost their lives to disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse – 50 percent.
After watching what has happened over the past fifty years in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and seeing the money that is to be made from such ventures, I wonder if the adage should have a corollary: ‘Those who understand the lessons of history are only too happy to repeat them.
How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash and sink into the stewpot of North America.
Indeed, North America Indian policy in the last half of the nineteenth century had many of the qualities of a bad movie. It was a low-budget affair with a simplistic plot: politicians, soldiers, clerics, social scientists, and people of unexamined goodwill dash about North America, saving themselves from Indians by saving Indians from themselves.
A great many intelligent and compassionate people have called residential schools a national tragedy. And they were. But perhaps “tragedy” is the wrong term. It suggests that the consequences of residential schools were unintended and undesired, a difficult argument to make since, as Ward Churchill points out, the schools were national policy.
You know you’re only old if you want to be.
No one needs a watch. What we need is time.
Moses would probably make a pot of tea and tell him a story. And maybe that was it, maybe in the end a good story was the best anyone could do.