Red Mans Burden

Hi Friends
I appreciate the internet and use it frequently. I have investigated and learned causes and effects to our many political issues at my own pace. I have been able to go back and read the first reports of the missing and murdered Aboriginal women, the first hints of trouble within the First Nations University, the concerns of the First Nations fisheries on both coasts, the murders of our men and women while in police custody, the heart wrenching accounts of the children being scooped up and removed from their communities, our epidemic health issues, as well as the sad state of incarceration and over representation of our people in the criminal justice system.
In each instance the various First Nations came forward with reasonable requests and studies to support each of these and many other problems faced by our communities, usually with workable solutions presented as well.
Governments ( Provincial and Federal) answered either with their own reports and studies, or refused to comment at all, their final say being," suck it up or sue us ..but we have every intention of going forward with this or that, no matter what the consequences to you or your communities are, as we judge it to be in OUR best interest." And the news releases given are as usual, slanted, to make our concerns trivial, compared to the economic growth or the GDP and the betterment of the rest of the country as a whole.
"Suck it up...and quit your whining"
Without the court challenges program (taken away by the Harper Government) many of the poorer segments of society are left to do just that. "Suck it up!." And then when the predicted calamity comes about, a band-aid is stuck on, promises are made, and then the denials begin and then back to business as usual.
As disheartening as I find this method of governance, I have come to expect this of Harper and his ghouls. Truth be told, this is a practice I have noted in all the Conservative Governments here and in the U.S.
Sad as I find this, it is the comments attached to these news sites that I find the most disheartening.
Racists abound. The racism spewed through these sites show a genuine hatred of the Indigenous people of this country. Not a mistrust, not a misunderstanding nor a mere ignorance, but a vile black hatred of these people.
To what do I attribute the bigots wrath?
Lack of education? To some extent. Vilification by the governments in question? Most definitely!
America has in the past, and continues to make villains and savages of their Amerindians in movies, and sport club names, war machines and subversive combat plots, wholly ignoring the ways these names came into their consciousness altogether. When they use the very names of the brave Chief's (who led the resistance to colonization), to bring macho/bravado to the young men they send out to murder women and children in a foreign war zones, they show not only disrespect for us, but also serve to inspire hatred against our Indigenous hero's.
The Canadian Governments are much more insidious than that though. They make enemies of us here at home. They bracket all the expense of all social programs in and around First Nations plights. They seemingly favor our communities with special attention and government monies at the expense of the poor unfortunate tax-payers in this country. Or so they have led them to believe, fostered by the rhetoric of a very concerned, benevolent, paternalistic sounding government official's attention to the Aboriginal communities need of government help in meeting the social ills found on the reservations.
By the way, these ills are a direct result of colonization. Ills visited on the people by the very policies of the colonizers who apologize for them and now make like they are there to help the communities overcome these traits, "due to an inherited weakness bred of their very culture."
This leaves our poor maligned Indigenous communities and individuals targets of the misinformed and bigoted
Canadian populace. The ignorance spewed on the news sites, (that is whenever the national papers do deem a story of our communities worthy of print or as noted many times before, salacious enough) is mind boggling. From behind the faceless, nameless comments sections of any of these main stream daily's, you can read all sorts of fuming wrath. The fact is that this misinformed, uneducated, mindless drivel, would lead one to the conclusion that these were the rants of the under achievers in the society, rightly feeling that their government has let them down yet again. These anonymous drones are fretful that" the F#@%$## Indians are going to wind up better off then me. They should be buying their own homes, paying their own way to university and stop whining about the damn treaties and their rights!!!"
Ignorant, misinformed, uneducated,...but thats what they are being fed by their elected officials...who have said many of the same things, just in a more eloquent manner.
regards Debra