[National Post Online] July 27, 2001 I want a piece of this First People's action Elizabeth Nickson National Post SALTSPRING ISLAND - I too would like to live the way my ancestors did. Or rather the way some of my ancestors did, the ones who arrived in 1629, who had lots of land, and servants, and money, not the ones engaged in constant warfare, the being or keeping of slaves, the ones who starved to death, were burned alive or died early in indescribable pain or childbirth. I'd also like all those other people who arrived on this continent after say, 1700, to bugger off or pay me a great deal of money. I was here first, or rather my ancestors were, and they were great and good people without exception and all you folks from the very worst parts of Europe, Africa and Asia have ruined things, and have no right to be here unless you pay me a great deal of money. I also, as a tax on top of the tax, want the use of all the things you invented. I want hospitals. I want universities. I want a highway system. Free. But all that cultural stuff -- the Pilgrims, the pointy hats, Thanksgiving, that you think is yours? It's not. We invented harvests. It's all mine, you can't use it. It insults my dignity. Last week, I came across a house paint colour named after my ancestors: Phelps tan or mouse or something. I was so upset I've blocked it. I fumed for days. I had to have lots and lots of meetings, I've talked to lawyers, and I've decided I want royalties. Plus I'm tough, I'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court and you are going to pay for that too. On the face of it, this is the argument Canada's native population is using to hold back progress of all of us, but mostly for their own people, who are forced by the irresponsible among them to stay in catastrophic isolation, infantile, dependent, in a constant miasma of self-pity and resentment, convinced they are surrounded by seas of racists. And in British Columbia, the rest of us, which is to say the 3.29 million who are not the 93,000 natives, or the weak-minded and petty larcenists who feed on the aggrievement business, are feeling in a state of major GRRRR. A referendum? Bring it on. It can't come fast enough. We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more. This, of course, is pure treason to the vast native rights bureaucracy, who for the past 30 years have, in the words of Comanche columnist David A. Yeagley, "been walking the black man's road, of baiting, belittling, provoking and bullying white people then running for cover, screaming racist when their white victims react." The only anonymous hate mail I've ever received is from natives who object to my expressing my belief that the native business is a thorough-going racket. But my argument does make sense, for many reasons, not least among which being that archeologists, physical anthropologists and even geneticists, are beginning to suspect that the First Peoples on this continent may have, in fact, been Europeans. An important part of native Canadian and American identity is based on the belief that they, and no other race, were here first. They therefore make a strong moral claim on our national conscience. But if they were not -- and native communities are doing just about everything they can to hold back the progress of scientific investigation into this -- then they are just another migratory race. Let's move on to the treatment of native Indians by white settlers and their armies. The Indians of North America are conquered peoples. They are not alone. In the blood of each and every one of us flows the blood of some conquered race or other. Warfare, even in these relatively enlightened times is annoyingly hard to stamp out. But righting the wrongs of the past is impossible. We have no more bloody and tragic an example than the catastrophe of recent South African history to prove to us what happens to a culture when "truth and reconciliation" are allowed to run riot. And no less an observer and Indian sympathizer, Theodore Roosevelt stated, "Undoubtedly the Indian has often suffered terrible injustice at our hands. A number of instances. are indelible blots on our fair fame; and yet, in describing our dealings with the red men as a whole, historians do us much less than justice. It was wholly impossible to avoid conflicts with the weaker race, unless we were willing to see the American continent fall into the hands of some other strong power; and even had we adopted such a ludicrous policy, the Indians themselves would have made war upon us. It cannot be too often insisted that they did not own the land; or, at least, that their ownership was merely such as that claimed often by our own white hunters. To recognize the Indian ownership of the limitless prairies and forests of this continent -- that is to consider the dozen ... who hunted at long intervals over a territory of a thousand square miles as owning it outright -- necessarily implies a similar recognition of the claims of every white hunter, squatter, horse-thief, or wandering cattle-man." In his dotage, my father used to sit with a native woman so that my mother could run errands. Apparently, he used to assure her (with enormous passion), that he too had native blood in his family. This puzzled and amused us till we remembered his aunt had, in fact, married an Olympic runner who was half-Indian. At the time, this marriage caused a rift in the family. An additional rift I should say, because WASP families, contrary to racist, classist prejudice, can out-Soprano the best of mobster families with their passions. (Honestly, where do you think Jacobean tragedy came from?) When my brothers and I were kids, my father used to bark that mixing native and white blood made the offspring idiots. By which I suppose he meant his cousins, whom he adored. We used to tell him he was nuts, and the shouting would go on for weeks. In the '60s, we '60s kids were on the natives' side and now just about everyone sane acknowledges no inherent defect in any race. Whitey has come a long long, long way. We need natives in every profession, neighbourhood, school and church so it is time for the native community to knock those old (but not first-growth) trees off their collective shoulder and come on down the road to meet us as equals, not wards of the state. And Premier Gordon Campbell and the citizens of British Columbia might remember in the year ahead that history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. ______________________________________________________________________ Other Stories by this Writer ______________________________________________________________________ 7/20/2001 - Bag the advice. I'm not listening 7/13/01 - Envy is both spur and gall 7/7/01 - The Last Best Place 7/6/01 - You can blame suburbia-bashing on Jackie Susann Copyright © 2001 National Post Online | Privacy Policy | Corrections National Post Online is a Hollinger / CanWest Publication.