The National Post has a series called “Rethinking the Reserve“. They’re looking into the problems of reserves, and how we can fix these problems. By now everyone is familiar with what’s wrong with Indian reserves: they’re poor, run down, with no roads and few jobs and fewer community services.
The solution of the left is to put more money in the pockets of chiefs and to codify faith-based government.
The solutions proposed in the Post are better, they seem reasonable. But one thing they left out was that we need to firmly impose a separation of religion and state – or I suppose ’smoke house’ and state. Nothing holds people back more than commitment to blind superstition. Especially amongst the Salish where you must pay for everything to do with the faith. [I can't imagine Christians queuing up to pay the priest and pal bearers at the end of a funeral. The Salish do.]
I’ve lived on a reserve, I have family there, and I hate the reserve. The best thing that can be done for the people of the reserve is to help them leave it. The second best thing is to return to them their individual right to private property, to allow them to be free from religion – especially native religion – and to give them a means to hold their leaders accountable. Holding their leaders accountable means making them weaker – not strengthening them by putting all of the jobs in their hands like the Osoyoos people have done.
As for the left, it is not liberal to deny people the right to private property, it is not liberal to deny people the right to democracy, and it is certainly not liberal to turn people (even if they are criminals) over to a religious cult for sentencing and punishment (nor to deny justice to victims of rape by allowing their attackers to get out of jail by grunting their way around a fire while covered in idiotic face paint).
You can read the entire post series here.
