Hacker News Reader

Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Personally I think it's rather naive to immigrate to a country and then not to expect to inherit what comes with that, both the good and the bad. I think everyone who claims themselves as a Canadian hold this responsibility equally, I don't really care what generation Canadian you are or where you immigrated from, you don't get to pick and choose your Canadianness, we're all in this together. Isn't that part of the beauty of Canada? To embrace each other, tackle hard problems, and move our society forward?

View on HN

If you pull the thread all the way back - if it’s morally right to pay reparations, wouldn’t it also be morally correct in the same vein to give the land back?

How do you actually pay reparations for taking someone’s land?

If you pull the thread all the way back - if it’s morally right to pay reparations, it would also be morally correct in the same vein, to give the land back. That is correct. If they wanted the land back, and I had to move, I wouldn't be opposed to that, and I'd imagine my opinion is more common than one might expect.

That said, I'm not sure how useful the point is. I've very rarely heard a native person say they would like that. I have heard that proposed, usually drunken and angry over beer. When I was a kid my dad had the Chief of Couchiching First Nation over for dinner. In my 17 year old wisdom, I eagerly explained how sad it is that natives don't want to go live in Toronto. He said, natives would love to be in Toronto, if Toronto was a little more like a reserve. I think they have unfortunately long accepted they've been colonized, the treaties were not honored, and their culture was destroyed. Meaningful reparation at this point is unlikely to be about land or money, it's about Canada accepting it cannot be Canada without real change to re-incorporate the culturual growth that was strangled.

Hey pal, I almost wonder if our Dads know each other. Our upbringings were so similar, just a couple of provinces apart.

My version of that story was when the Chief of the Peter Ballantyne First Nation came to visit us. I spent the first couple years of my life on the PBFN. I was about your age and had the same questions about how great it would be if they moved to my city. he explained that on reserve, he can just be a man. He can be good, he can be bad, he can make mistakes and he can have successes. In a city, it doesn't matter what he does, he's just 'a fucking Indian.' If he makes a mistake, he's a 'dirty fucking Indian'. If he has success, he's a 'fucking Indian sucking at the teet'.

I also remember him cracking a joke. "Do they know this isn't India?" :)

I've never heard a proposal to give back the land unless people have been sipping. And I say silly stuff too when I sip so who can judge. The most radical idea I've heard outside of those settings is to treat current lands as sovereign nations that have an equal standing with the rest of the nation. The goal seems to be peaceful and respectful coexistence.

I think we can all (or at least should all) be able to get behind that. Wouldn't peaceful coexistence be a pretty amazing way to live??

“treat current lands as sovereign nations that have an equal standing with the rest of the nation”

This isn’t as radical as you may think. It’s been a stated goal for a long time. I’m always surprised how the actual meaning of these words don’t seem to make any impact on Canadians. Perhaps phrased another way, such as, “When I have an Ojibway passport…” might catch people’s’ attention.

Tangentially, they do have status cards, I worked at a wal-mart up north for a summer after high school and I used to have to type the number on the card into the cash register to override the tax on the transaction of people with a status card. The same wal-mart that banned people with a status card from buying mouthwash because they labeled the natives drunks and didn't want to propagate the issue. Yah seriously, that happened.

Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s not radical at all. It’s almost a word for word quote of what early Indian agents said to get people to sign. It asks Canada to abide by the treaties it signed! Crazy and radical thinking, hey??

Weirdly, in the Canada of today, that’s considered extremely radical. But it’s also considered radical to think First Nations should have clean drinking water.

If you’re interested in one heck of a read, learn about a Cree Chief named Big Bear. He quite literally saw into the future - I think his words make him one of the few genuine political visionaries of his era in Canada.

If you’re or anyone else is interested, I have a bunch of books. My email address is in my profile - some of these books are hard to find and I’m privileged enough to be able to afford them. I’d be happy as anything to mail them out to anyone interested, provided you give them wings and give them away to someone else. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com