The Saskatoon Star Phoenix lays out the bottom line on the continuing meltdown at the First Nation’s University of Canada in an editorial that might as easily been titled “Too Many Chiefs, Not Enough Academia”;
Having created a segregationist institution to bring “Indian control to Indian education,” the least that can be done is to ensure that FNUC can provide young aboriginal people with a high-quality education that transcends the undercurrent of parochialism and xenophobia that have been exposed within FNUC and FSIN in recent months. Unless there are strong indications within weeks that changes are forthcoming to make FNUC truly independent and worthy of being called a university, the U of S should withdraw its representation on FNUC’s board and the U of R should move to end the affiliation that grants degrees to FNUC’s graduates.
Am I reading this correctly… they let the natives run their own university and now it has hit the skids?
I would not be the least surprised at this as native people are so easy going I sometimes fail to see how they existed as societies in a lot of places.
I hope no honest hard-working students are denied any legitimate degrees due the malfeasance of a corrupt regieme.
Mr. Walsh: Most of your commentary I enjoy, however often enough you say things that are just on the edge of acceptability. In the West, First Nations people are only three or four generations away from being hunter-gatherers. There are a lot of anthropology books to explain that type of society. The transition to an agrarian society took most groups a couple of thousand years. The transition to an industrial society took a couple of hundred years. We are still dealing with some of the effects. We are now transitioning to the information age. We are asking First Nations people to make three jumps in one fell swoop.
I think the explanation for what has happened at FNUC (and elsewhere) has more to do with hanging on to the tribal government models that so lend themselves to corruption, nepotism and power politics, than it has to do with anthropology.
To suggest that by virtue of genetic ancestry, aboriginal Canadians need time to “evolve” is to be caught up in the same type of soft racism so exploited by the left.
It’s as ridiculous as telling me that I would be incapable of adapting to life as an IT professional in downtown Manhattan because 3 generations of my ancestors farmed the dryland prairie of the Palliser Triangle, and the fields of Europe before that.
That’s the point. Without private property rights to foster independance they maintain traditional tribal politics. They distribute the spoils of the hunt, in this case government largesse.
I agree with Rebarbarian & Kate in the sense that I think the question is: how do we help a particular group of our fellow citizens, who share an ancient cultural tradition, absorb the global transitions of the last few centuries while preserving their volitional collective identity? Indeed, can we even do it for more recent but still historic cultural traditions?
I don’t think throwing bad government at the problem is a good idea (not that Rebarbarian suggested that). At some point, cultures evolve to go with history’s flow, or they are trampled standing athwart the tide of history.
Under these conditions, letting ambulance chasers and corrupt statists run the show is all wrong. We’re supposed to be trying to make things better, not worse.
Kate is right on the money with this. You really have to live here to believe at what’s going on.
Canada must wake up to the huge problems forced onto TAXPAYERS in this province by natives. The FNUC is only the tip of the iceberg. Corrupt tribal leaders supported by a corrupt Federal government and cottled by socialists. The older generation in this province exhibits a strange tolerance to this, similar to their unwavering support of all things Saskatchewan (read CCF). This is not true with the younger people who feel allienated by a poor enconomy and racial tension. If the status quo remains, expect things to get a lot worse.
I suspect that the status quo will not stand, Barnstormer.
As you mention, cultures are as much replenished by their young as they are their history. Independent of the problems that every culture has with their young folk, if you look across all great cultural icons, many accomplished their most significant work in their formative years. Fortunately, their accomplishments (which were not always commonly accepted as beneficial) tend to be balanced by our elder sagacious iconoclasts.
So the pendelum swings back and forth across the generations, moderated by the general advances in (now global) civilization. ‘Course, I’m a pathalogical optimist.
rebarbarian wrote:”That’s the point. Without private property rights to foster independance they maintain traditional tribal politics. They distribute the spoils of the hunt, in this case government largesse”.
Please! Show me in the Constitution or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms when you, me or anyone else in this bankrupt country has “private property rights”?
And for those of us who have no private property for the feds to steal, there are always LAWSUITS!
(And you can rest assurred- that whatever else transpires from this, there are always 3000 Lawyers with our Department of ‘Justice’ in Ottawa, who deserve to get a piece of this action- it’s the Canadian way).
Hernando De Soto said that “The cities of the Third World and the former communist countries are teeming with entrepreneurs. You cannot walk through a Middle Eastern market, hike up to a Latin American village, or climb into a taxicab in Moscow without someone trying to make a deal with you. The inhabitants of these countries possess talent, enthusiasm, and an astonishing ability to wring profit out of practically nothing.” It’s possible to keep such people down only if governments dedicate themselves to the pursuit of really bad policies for decades at a time”.
Tony, “collective identity” is an oxymoron.
Not at all, Ed. For example, I am president of a volitional collective identified as the Gale Force Malt & Hops Croquet Club.