A Double-Take from Last Indian Summer... Open Letter To Christie Blatchford

(SASKATCHEWAN) - Note: This letter was also sent to Postmedia News, The PMO, John Duncan at Indian Affairs and all the ships at sea, not to mention 30 million sleeping Canadians

My agent in Tronno has forwarded me your insightful column concerning the nasty Caledonian Occupation and your skillful navigating through the litigious labyrinth, the various legal, moral and commonsensical positions of the federal government, the entrepreneurs involved in the project and the innocent Canadian residential victims, bright-eyed but disillusioned, and the relative arguments pertaining to class action, rightful compensation and grievances under something called Canadian Law.

Meanwhile, looming in the background, hardly stated but obviously assumed to be, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, as the government 40% lawyers are fond of saying, the real villains of the piece: The Six Nations, who really did those nasty things like suggest that it was their land in the first place.

Let me begin by noting an historical event known as the Two-Row Wampum Treaty of 1613. It illustrated that our hosts at that time didn't WANT to become white Europeans, such as those who were beginning to arrive on Turtle Island with the Bible in one hand and an eviction notice in the other. The two blue bars on a field of white of that ceremonial wampum depicted the parallel existence of TWO distinct cultures, living in harmony. In the 400-odd years since, the party of the first part kept its word. The party of the second part, in its most recent manifestation, is ably represented by the government and your other protagonists, all of whom, including you and your newspaper, pretend like they never heard of it.

You know – the good burghers of New Amsterdam bought the island of Manhattan (at least from The Battery to around 125th Street) from the local loafers for $24 worth of trinkets. As any fan of Donald Trump knows, the place is now worth trillions. That's the punch line.

But in reality, the Manhattan natives, knowing that, according to their view of civilization, you can't buy or sell Mother Earth, considered the trinkets not as a purchase price, but rather as a permanent gesture of friendship and respect. They offered to SHARE the bloody place, as well as the rest of North America, with the pale strangers, just as the Two-Row Wampum called for harmonious co-existence of two peoples, side by side in perpetuity.

So the joke is really on us, ownership or custodian-wise, despite the fact that we still don't get it.

Here's a quote from a recent National Post editorial preaching to the native population who, it's assumed, don't know crap about raising kids: “The link between parental dysfunction and negative childhood outcomes has been the subject of generations of social-policy research in both the United States and Canada.”

No kidding. How about the link between parental dysfunction and two or three hundred years of intergenerational genocide? When you teach children for six generations that their parents and their culture are worthless, because unChristian, mark what discord follows: and our white social workers have their work cut out for them.

I'm a bit off topic here, but the “uniquely aboriginal, government-funded” solutions are the cause of all those people staggering around on Skid Row. Of course, the government is skipping the previous four centuries of brutal British colonial law, backed by a few papal bulls that declared that any society not born-again Christian was made up of sub-humans, so anything you want to do with them is fair game.

It's not your bailiwick, Christie, but if you were to attend a typical band council meeting, you'd note the prevalence of recent model Mercedes' parked outside. “Our country's massively subsidized reserve system...” Yeah, right. You mean “massively subsidized tribal chiefs and band councils,” who live in baronial luxury, while the people continue to starve, enjoy an unemployment rate of 36% (admittedly, Canadianly, superior to the 80% of unemployed loafers south of the border at Pine Ridge) and a suicide rate ten times the national average. John Duncan and the other dolts in the Department of Indian Affairs haven't figured this out yet. Or even worse, maybe they have.

Harper has taken care of the rez school issue, apologizing for what he treats as a sort of Sunday School picnic gone wrong, where kiddies weren't taught the appropriate social skills, and we were obliquely guilty of trying to force them to be little white kids. Of course, the Prime didn't mention sodomy, rape, medical experimentation and murder, so we'll forget it. It's old stuff anyway, and talking about it isn't consistent with the broad strokes of our social-policy agenda.

But the reality concerning the assimilation thing is that the people who were here first don't necessarily want it, and we've killed off so many of them since Columbus, Cabot and Cartier, that it wouldn't really be a big deal to let them have a small tranche of the land we've stolen from them.

Easy as pie. Get rid of our medieval colonial laws, such as the Indian Act, and recognize that the ancient Two-Row Wampum Treaty should be and could be a very practical reality.

A final sidebar: while the mainstream media and their readers are fixated on the wealth of white Canadians and Gross Domestic Product, native people tend to think about oldies such as trees, water and dealing with Gross Domestic Politicians.

The altercation, Ms Blatchford, should not be whether the Ottawa 40-percenters, or the entrepreneurs, or the poor residents who correspond to the homesteaders in the John Wayne scenario, are right and entitled to whatever. Rather, the question should simply be:

Since, as Kahentinetha Horn has so eloquently stated (in her Mohawk Nation News) - you should read her some time, Christie - it would be so simple - so simple – for them to be given (not allowed to squat on Crown land if they're good), GIVEN, a tiny strip of what was theirs until we screwed them out of it. Then maybe they wouldn't be demonstrating around our pristine developments.

Simple idea. Anathema to Stephen Harper, John Duncan and the editorial board there at the National Post, of course. But one of these days one of those poster boys (or girls), selected routinely from the visible minorities as Governor General in this so-enlightened Canada, will come up with it, and immediately be awarded the Order of Canada.

It beats a Pulitzer all to hell. So why don't you go for it, Christie. Be the first to suggest it.

Bill Annett grew up a writing brat; his father, Ross Annett, at a time when Scott Fitzgerald and P.G. Wodehouse were regular contributors, wrote the longest series of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post's history, with the sole exception of the unsinkable Tugboat Annie.

At 18, Bill's first short story was included in the anthology “Canadian Short Stories.” Alarmed, his father enrolled Bill in law school in Manitoba to ensure his going straight. For a time, it worked, although Bill did an arabesque into an English major, followed, logically, by corporation finance, investment banking and business administration at NYU and the Wharton School. He added G.I. education in the Army's CID at Fort Dix, New Jersey during the Korean altercation.

He also contributed to The American Banker and Venture in New York, INC. in Boston, the International Mining Journal in London, Hong Kong Business, Financial Times and Financial Post in Toronto.

Bill has written six books, including a page-turner on mutual funds, a send-up on the securities industry, three corporate histories and a novel, the latter no doubt inspired by his current occupation in Daytona Beach as a law-abiding beach comber.