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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (156825)	1/23/2005 12:32:39 AM
From: marcos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Yes, that's also true until you get to 'model for effective segregation' which is pretty dicey, as we do not bar indians from holding land or jobs anywhere in the country, though of course they have to pay taxes on employment outside reserves, like any citizen .... from early days government policy was to encourage assimilation, not the reverse as the apartheid bunch wanted ... in fact one of the few reasons to like Chrétien imho, was that during a term as minister of indian affairs in the sixties, he put out a white paper or something stating bold new hurry-up objectives toward assimilation .... proud as punch he was, and rightly so, well you should have heard the commotion that followed ... too many vested interests felt their toes about to be stepped on, plus, from the indian point of view, it sounded like he had to surrender all claims based on indigenous status in order to fully assimilate, which wasn't actually anywhere near true at the time, but was ballyhooed as such anyway Major problem with reserves here is that they are held in common and tradition is that consensus must be reached before any changes are made, consequently not much gets done ... that is changing now, in some ways in some places, but not enough and there are backward steps at times too ... our friends on the reserve will not be there long i think, they're being frustrated in a plan to use a few acres, they are better off to go buy their own imho ..... i've worked for the band, and will again this year probably, but it can be a painful process .... over twenty years ago, a good friend of mine was elected chief, quite young, brilliant and likeable guy, he launched off with a programme of individual rights and responsibilities that would have made Hernando de Soto proud, and got a good way on the road to it too, before they shut him down ... partly the feds responsible there, long story ... anyway, his time was up and the next chief had the same policies but was less effective, the one after that positively sucked from every angle, since then there's been improvement in some things, not in others ... you can't get long-term land tenure on the reserve, is the fundamental problem, so you're restricted to entirely portable businesses .... corruption and nepotism by band management has rarely been bad here, there are scarey stories of it not so far away though Anyway, the boer segregationists wouldn't have found our system adequate for their purpose, indians here are only as trapped as they want to be ... i've worked with, and for, quite a number of full blooded indians that were pretty assimilated, some lived on the reserve or kept in close touch with it, others not so much at all .... i think assimilation is the best idea and is inevitable eventually, but it should happen naturally not by government fiat, and people will always have those roots The ultimate answer, is that we all marry each others' sisters