What's Up in the Rez?

Canada's failed residential schools system for aboriginal peoples is back in the news with a bullet. Just in time to kick start lagging truck sales, it has just been announced that, along with abusing native kids and committing cultural genocide, dooming hundreds of thousands of them and their 'rellies' to lives blighted by abuse and failures to thrive, the University of Guelph has just discovered the government of Canada was using some of them to perform diet experiments.

Right there along with the story was a photo of Elsa the Beast of Belsen, newly immigrated to Canada no doubt, drawing blood from some poor native lad.

Needless to say, there are the beginnings of the sallying forth of the abused, " I never did get enough of that gruel, Ollie."

Being starved is something that you might think was a topic for the 'truth and reconciliation' panel, eh? Like how can you have truth and reconciliation if the government is hiding the results of medical experiments using Indians as guinea pigs. Frank Fontaine and other native leaders weren't long off the mark with cries of genocide. One ex-inmate claimed, "They never did treat me like a human being."

I thought the cash settlement, official government apology and more money splashed into 'programs' to help people come to terms with this stuff, was supposed to have put the matter to rest. Obviously not.

Not if there's a chance to reopen the hearings and work out another deal. Those trucks from last time will be ancient by now. And the dealers have to have been thirsty after that long-ago banquet of gratuitous sales. "Drive 'er away to-day and we'll settle-up when the cheque gets cut. Better still why wait, I'll give ya three quarters of the value if you sign your cheque over to me to-day."

Why would Canada's Indians ever want the government to "give the place" back to them? The government keeps on buying and re-buying it. It's a gift that keeps on giving, a bottomless bank account that's done nobody much good.

Watch this issue being fought out between the 'new wave' and the 'old guard'  of  the aboriginal people. With a bit of luck, Harpo the Magnificent can split the difference and stay the course.

Guessnocentric Learning

The Toronto School Board has decided that one way to stop young black men from shooting each other at school would be to get them all to stay in one school together and teach them an 'Afrocentric ' view of the world. And so the Board is preparing to launch its first all-black educational institution.

Not that there's anything wrong with exclusive educational institutions - the rich have had them for years. Some religious groups and organizations, too. Just look at the Army - although 2 military colleges have bitten the bullet. An all-black school might be just what's needed.

But if the bone-headed dopiness displayed by an overjoyed Director of Education is any indication, the school curriculum might be in for an interesting slant on reality. Didn't the head honcha of the Board go all deep when she gleefully reminded the media that 'eurocentric' history wasn't the only kind. Take those Spaniards who 'discovered the new world', the conquest was different from the Indians' point of view she gushed. As if the Indian point of view, if we could figure it out at a distance of 3 centuries, would change a single fact of that history. And as if any sort of school history textbook to-day would relate that story in the words of only Hernan Cortes, and not mention anything about the peoples he encountered. Bottom line, they do help kids understand what happened by looking at events from different perspectives. At the black school they might concentrate on telling the story perhaps featuring one of the Moriscos present, but once again the 'history' would be the same. Something tells me it wouldn't stop Jar-vhonn from bringing his shooter to school if he was feeling dissed, or quitting to lie-in late if his momma let him.

To be rednecked about it, letting the black kids all go to their own school might eliminate some of the racial bumpff that does on in some of the others. But next I can hear the Moslem kids starting to agitate for their schools too. A math school for Chinese, East Indian schools, Canadian Indian schools - the French already have theirs. And that should leave the polyglot Euroschools that did such a fine job of turning 'euros' into Canadians.

And what about the 'wanna-bees'? Those white kids with the baggy trouz who wantz to be bruth-ahz. Who knowz the rap and wearz da colahz? Like the M&M copyist from the Trailer Park Boys, any 'euro' who wishes may apply for the black academy. But admittance is to be determined by space availability. Now whitey will get to know what it's like at the end of the line and the back of the bus.