Aboriginals should burn less and think more

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Oct 2014

Today, aboriginal protesters closed downtown Hamilton to traffic in a protest against the federal government's failure to bend to their latest demand.  Over a thousand aboriginal women are missing and feared killed over the last decade or so, and no one in power seemed to care.  It became the the cause du jour to demand that Prime Minister Stephen Harper order an inquiry into the matter.  The press picked up on it, being a handy tong with which to beat a man they don't like and would replace with Justin Trudeau.

Harper, however, stood his ground, saying the matter was already studied, and another one would not solve the problem.  Aboriginal women, leaving the reserve without an education or marketable skills, become addicted to drugs or alcohol and end up as sex workers for money.  Sex work is a very dangerous job, and some of the aboriginal women who engage in it end up killed.  What another study into causes would do to alleviate the problem is open to question.

The protests themselves abounded with unintended irony.  The pagan ritual of burning a 'sacred fire' in front of Hamilton's court house, to avoid melting the pavement, was performed by burning the wood in a cast iron bowl.  Metallurgy and the casting of iron are the white man's inventions.  A large teepee was erected on the grounds opposite the court house to keep the participants dry during the frequent rain showers.  A teepee is an invention of the plains Indians.  The natives of the Hamilton area lived in longhouses, not teepees.  Faux and erstaz nativism reigned; and most were obvious to it.

Below are some thoughts which occured on the day of the protests.

The Aboriginal protests this weekend, which are meant to call for a study into violence against Aboriginal women, is a testament to willful ignorance.  The subject has been studied to death.

The website of the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada shows 39,600 documents responding to the search term “aboriginal women.”  These documents include numerous police reports and studies by the RCMP, statistical results from Statistics Canada, and reports from the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Status of Women Forum, which last issued its report on the subject on February 25, 2013.

The statistical results comprise the data upon which all the speculation as to causes is based.  Anybody can see from the statistics that there is a problem of violence against aboriginal women; the cause of this problem is sheer speculation.  Given the extreme political correctness that surrounds aboriginal issues, one can hardly trust any analysis.  An analysis which placed the blame for violence against aboriginal women squarely at the door of aboriginal society and culture would be denounced as racism and, if it were even published, would not be accepted by the people it most concerns.  An analysis which placed the blame at the door of white society would be regarded as old news.  Of course whites are responsible for everything bad that has happened to aboriginals in the last 400 years.  What else is new?

More thinking and less burning is required on the part of the aboriginal community if they are serious about addressing this problem of violence against their women.  Burning wood in the middle of Main Street and blockading traffic throughout the region amounts to a demand that the white man solve an aboriginal problem.  And, of course, such problems are solved by throwing money at them.

The problem of violence against aboriginal women has been studied to death.  The data is available for those who really care about such things.  One can speculate all one wishes as to why the figures are as they are.  Disrupting traffic as a means to call for another study is unserious.  Start by doing your homework, and then offer a serious proposal.
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