We all fell into this "Ring of Fire..."

Hi Friends,

I watch news stories and try to predict the eventual out come. The news I'm about to relate began late last year or early this year, depending on your particular time frames.

The Marten Falls community was under great suffering and crying out for help: E Coli in the drinking water, teen suicides, extreme poverty, third-world living conditions - the usual northern reserve issues. But this insignificant (to the Ontario government) little community became quite significant, and a cause celeb. to that government very quickly when chromite was discovered on their territory.

In short order the community found themselves hosting surprise visits from the Northern Development minister bearing gifts of fruit baskets for this poor, impoverished lot. Kinda like the trade beads of days gone by!

Where unpotable water and extortionately high suicide rates before didn't stir the government's altruistic nature, the ring of fire (as was dubbed the chromite deposit) could and did.

Untold wealth was to be had by McGuinty's Liberal government of Ontario, if only they could get those pesky Aboriginals on side. Billions of dollars for the mining stakes for the largest chromite deposit ever found - to bad it is on Indigenous lands.

This, of course, would only be a minor set back for the McGuinty Liberals. The solution, for McGuinty, was to push Bill 191, a law that would abrogate treaty rights and allow the government to go about developing the north as they see fit. This would be in direct conflict with section 35 of the Constitution, which is there to protect Aboriginal and treaty rights for the Indigenous people of Canada.

I'll bet the strategy meeting went something like this:

"You know what would be fun? We could make our announcement on the anniversary of the declaration of Indigenous Peoples Act. I'll call Harper and maybe he can send that hang-around-the-fort-Indian, Burnoose out with the... "we the conservative party are still pondering the U.N. Indigenous peoples declaration and may (or may not) sign it at a later date"...announcement, and we can just slip our little announcement in there then too.

"Then while the Indians or Aboriginals (or whatever the hell they are calling themselves these days) are all up in arms over Harper's refusal to sign on to the U.N. declaration, they'll completely miss the connection between Bill 191 and the Chromite. It's a perfect plan!"
Maybe even played a few bars of that old Johnny Cash tune...Ring of Fire...

So it now looks like, to me, that it is once again time to defend our treaty rights. This time lets decide to define them as well. I get angry at the stop-gap measures and half-assed defenses usually settled for by our First Nations leadership, as happened with the taxation protests earlier this year. That our leaders left a large portion of their citizens, namely the off-reserve portion, only partially tax exempt (like partial citizens), left me and other off-reserve protesters righteously indignant. It is, after all, estimated that about 70% of most reserve populations live off reserve.

That kind of revolt resolution allows Canada to turn its smirking face to the world and look down its nose in scorn at the civil conflicts raging around the world because they have found a better way: pay just enough lip service and just enough in transfer payments to give the smallest glimmer of hope to the Indigenous people to quash any unrest.

We Indigenous peoples live on hope it would seem. The Transfer payments to the reserves have been capped since 1993. Soon, I predict, we will all be worth the five dollars per-head as set out in the original treaties. Yet, I'll bet the INAC Minister's salary isn't capped, nor their pension fund.

The fatal flaw in the plans of other colonizers is that giving nothing can only lead to unrest, civil war and extreme religious fanaticism. Evidently the message from our government to others is: Look to Canada and learn!

Hope, it would seem, has become these colonizers weapon of choice for keeping the civil peace.

Or at least that is the way it seems to me.
regards debra