First Nations’ Railway Protests in Canada
Posted on 22-02-2020
This is not something Justin Trudeau can solve in one or two weeks. This problem goes back to 150-200 years and there is no magic wand to fix this. Even a “fix” is not clear what it would be. First nations are divided themselves. Some of them have accepted the offer by oil and gas companies to get a cut from the future revenues (from pipelines or not does not matter). Other first nation people are opposing the pipelines from principle. They want to preserve their pristineness, nature. Some of them or most of them argue that they were neglected over the past 150 years by successive governments. There is some truth to it.
When the settlers first occupied the land, they brought themselves technology. Slowly and surely and violently they occupied the living space of first nation people drastically altering their way of life. First nation peoples did not have technology to transform nature into goods and services. Nobody showed them how make a wheel. They did not participate in the creation of wealth. Sure, they were free to leave the reservations or their lands and join others to work in factories, stores, offices to create goods and services. To generate income. Those who remained on their land had no means to generate income and develop. They were dependent on the handouts of governments. Without the ability to generate income you can develop only so much from handouts. There is always a pressure to ask for more handouts to have potable water, drainage, houses, schools, grocery stores, etc. The governments often can not keep up with this demand and they fall behind. The handout has to be taken away from those who produce goods and services and distributed to the first nation peoples who want to preserve their way of life.
Can you have both? Preserve way of life and culture and participate in the creation of goods and services? This is the question. To some degree yes, to some degree no. Many immigrants preserve their culture after coming to Canada. Not much their way of life, but their culture.
I am nobody to tell first nations which way to pursue. Keep asking for a growing pie of handouts or to join into the creation of wealth. If they choose the latter then they can ask for productive investment (factories, found businesses in the form of worker coops, etc.) on their land from the government. But they need to exert labour to create wealth. If not, nothing will change. The tug of war between this and that will continue to be an issue for first nations and the rest of Canadians. You need a government to be partner in this. Our current government is unwilling or unable to allocate resources to do productive investment for anyone, let alone fist nations.