Question by : Why do people think natives are treated so badly?
I don’t understand how people can say natives are treated so badly. I always hear the same stuff, they were slaughtered by whites. Well not in Canada actually, very few native encounters with Europeans on Canadian soil were violent. A lot less than american land. A lot of natives died from disease and plague. A lot Europeans died from it as well, you don’t see Irish families pushing for reparations for their ancestors being treated like dirt.
The other point I always hear is their lands were stolen. Again, not true;
“In order to obtain title to most of the lands, the Canadian government proceeded with this series of treaties. Each treaty delineates a tract of land which was thought to be the traditional territory of the First Nation or Nations signing that particular treaty (the “tract surrendered”). In exchange for a surrender of their rights and title to these lands, the First Nations were promised a smaller parcel of land as a reserve, annual annuity payments, implements to either farm or hunt and fish and the right to continue to hunt and trap or hunt, trap and fish on the tract surrendered.”
They sold their lands to the Canadian government. Where most countries would have simply invaded the first nations people, the Canadian government bought them out. That’s not stealing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_treaties
And now they get a whole slew of benefits just for being aboriginal.
http://www.canadabenefits.gc.ca/f.1.2cl.3st@.jsp?geo=1&catid=32
That’s a lot of government funding. More than any non-aboriginal would ever get.
There’s a lot of complaints about killing their land, but I live in rural alberta and the reserves out here are constantly full of garbage, cars leaking mass amounts of oil (I worked in an oil shop near these reserves) and constant burning of garbage, tires, whatever needs disposal. And whenever they contest anything to do with oil it comes down to money not principle.
And to top it off, they don’t have to pay taxes. All that government funding, and aboriginals on a reserve don’t pay income tax, or house/land taxes, or GST. And receive money to help buying and repairing houses.
http://64.26.129.156/article.asp?id=1714
Aboriginals you see that are poor and hard off are the result of a corrupted council and chief, as the money is sent to them for them to allocate as they see fit. I know many non-reserve aboriginals who are doing just fine in their life without government assistance of any kind, what makes reserve natives so special?
For those shouting racist, you missed the part where I mentioned my native friends that didn’t live on reserves and don’t get government assistance that are doing fine. As for the taking of the lands, you obviously missed the wiki read on how their land wasn’t taken, it was sold to the government. Which is a lot better treatment than a lot of civilizations that have gotten NO reparations got. As for the europeans being immune to these diseases, loads had to die before others became immune, it’s just that nobody cared about them because they were lower class citizens in the British empire.
Wounded knee is a very sad example of the original aboriginals being treated poorly, but again this was in the U.S.A. They Metis actually got treated worse in canada than the full blooded aboriginals and get substantially less reparations.
Best answer:
Answer by Mark
Do you feel better after your 12-paragraph rant? By the way, Canadians are far more racist (shockingly so) toward aboriginals than Americans. They even ave a name for “people of French and Aboriginal background”: Metis. There was just something tonight on CBC news about how incredibly racist non-1st Nations people are to 1st Nations people.
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