First Nations and Caucasian Political Leaders

Monday, November 28, 2005

The up coming conference between Canada’s pre-kanadians and the elected leaders of our political parties has me a bit concerned about what is really happening between the First Nations and the Caucasian community. The two communities have historically been at odds with one another over almost everything from environment, health and childcare issues. Now I read in Oct. 31 Times Colonist that there is going to be a major conference where all the elected leaders will be meeting to discuss upgrading FN living standards. I read this article after glimpsing at the article of what has happened to the FN community, in (Kashechewan) northern Ontario, which has made national headlines in every major paper because of its in adequate drinking water. It also happened to be on the page just before the article about the little known group claiming responsibility for the India bombings, where that country’s indigenous community have been fighting for years for the in human living situation that they have been exposed too. To me this juxtaposition reveals the desperation of all indigenous people who are suffering all over the world as a part of the rippling effects of colonization.

The colonizers and the corporations that followed them into the indigenous people countries have systematically targeted indigenous people’s housing, food, medicines, education and sense of community values. Whose nations once had communities with almost non-existent social problems until the invaders came in and started laying claim to the land that was shared territory amongst the indigenous people. Having access to the land that they depended on to help them meet their communities need has been denied to the indigenous people, restricting their nations’ abilities to care for the land and its resources which housed and fed them. Creating a lack of accessibility to their own community, kin and land has deprived them of the educational leaders who would have taught them about medicinal plants and how to live of the land.


When the indigenous communities throughout the world were able to have access to the land, they were able to grow their own food and hunt or fish for what they needed, when they needed it. They never took more then what the matriarchs or community leaders said that they needed. Their community’s leaders had been taught to plan for the future.
Even their houses were built from the material that came from the ground on which they stands. These houses then would last longer in natural elements, for that area, and provide some shelter for the community without destroying the land. They would be big enough to house forty people or more, thus taking less land space to build single houses and creating a sense of community.

Their medicines would come in a surplus so that everyone in the community could be treated for any of their ailments. Their communities would learn from their elders what plants would be good for them and where to get them from the land and how to nurture the land should the supplies dwindle due to a drought or other natural disasters.

Indigenous people in the new millennium have had to learned learn alternative ways to do things in order for their communities to survive. With the progress of colonizers embarking on their land FN communities have been disbursed by the colonizers’ desires to possess all the things that are most valuable to the indigenous communities. The Indigenous people’s proactions that ensure their communities survival have been oppressed by the new colonizers leaving this new disease named oppression for the current generation to fight. They are have had to learn how to defend their existence as a part of the human race. Through this new position indigenous people have gone from being very proactive to learning how to survive amongst a group of people who have very different life values and do not see indigenous people as a viable race.