Why is it so hard to imagine a world in which ALL aboriginal lives matter?

Canadian media is currently focused on a decision in Canada in which a truck driver was found not guilty of murdering an Aboriginal woman named Cindy Gladue. There has been a lot of hand-wringing of late in the Canadian press about the plight of missing and murdered Aboriginal woman, and for good reason. There is a long history of turning a blind eye towards the Aboriginal community, and ignoring missing Aboriginal women, particularly sex workers.
What most of the media coverage tends to ignore completely is that while Aboriginal women do indeed suffer stunningly high murder rates, Aboriginal men are even more likely to be murdered.

Between 1980 and 2012, 14 per cent of female murder victims with a known ethnicity were aboriginal, far exceeding their 4 per cent share of the female population, according to Statistics Canada.
But 17 per cent of male murder victims were also aboriginal during that time. In total, nearly 2,500 aboriginal people were murdered in the past three decades: 1,750 male, 745 female and one person of unknown gender.

This is the part of liberal-minded, social justice warrior feminism that just enrages me so much: why is it so damn hard for these people to imagine a world in which all Aboriginal lives matter? Yes, it’s tragic that Aboriginal women suffer such an incredulous murder rate, but if their murder rate is incredulous, the murder rate Aboriginal men face is reaching fantastical heights that defy comprehension. Why do women matter more than men? Why is it so hard to care about both?

I actually think I have answer to that. I live in a community with a large Aboriginal population and count native Canadians among my friends and neighbors. I do my damndest to help where I can and behave with compassion and kindness at all times.

For those of you who are unaware of the history of the Aboriginal community in Canada, let me give you a rough, dirty and quick summary: beginning just before the turn of the century, the Canadian government attempted to “integrate” Aboriginal children into society through the deployment of something called a “residential school”. A more accurate word for these places would be “House of Horrors”, and the last one in Canada did not close until 1996.

Aboriginal children were essentially kidnapped from their families and taken to these “schools”, where they were beaten, humiliated, tortured and abused, both physically and sexually. Both men and women ran these institutions, and the women were no better than the men. Often, Aboriginal children would have their hair shorn, which was an incredibly traumatizing experience for those children to whom hair was deeply, culturally significant. They were beaten if they spoke to one another in their own language, even in private. They were forced to abandon their own spiritual beliefs and accept Christianity. In short, they were destroyed. Their spirits were broken and scattered like ashes on the wind.

Then, after this marvelous “education”, they were simply released into society to “assimilate”.

Yes, kidnapping, beating, raping, torturing and humiliating children is an excellent way to get them to embrace your culture. Has this ever worked anywhere in history ever? The true legacy of residential schools is that generations of children were raised without love, without kindness, without respect and without the protections most children are under from their parents and society at large. They were subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse. 4000 children died in residential schools, largely because of abuse and neglect.

And thus the cycle began….

Today, Aboriginal communities are rife with physical and sexual abuse, addiction and violence. In one generation, they were destroyed. Any group of children, anywhere, of any nationality or ethnicity or race, subjected to the “residential schooling” experiment would be facing the same crisis of culture, and the same issues.

We have an entire government ministry dedicated to Aboriginal Affairs and all they seem to do is bleat endlessly about how the problem is complex and deep-rooted and hard to solve, but it occurs to me, especially in light of yesterday’s post, that all those proclamations are complete and total bullshit. The problem is not hard to solve. It is easy to solve. It took one generation to destroy the Aboriginal community, and it will take one generation to fix it.

And a ton of money.

Guess what? That money is already being spent. We don’t need new money to solve the Aboriginal crisis. We just need to use the existing money differently.

And that is where feminism and caring more about Aboriginal women than men comes in.

Where does most of the money intended to assist the Aboriginal community go? Into the pockets of liberal arts graduates who administer programs and services via various government organizations and institutions. It goes to non-Aboriginal people who love cushy office jobs with great benefits and stellar pensions. Federal government workers? Yeah, they’re mostly women.

There are plenty of men too and the percentage of the federal workforce that is Aboriginal? Less than 3%.

97% of the federal workforce is non-Aboriginal, many of whom are charged with nannying the Aboriginal community and telling them what’s best.

Here’s a radical idea: give all the money meant to assist Aboriginal to Aboriginal people.

Not to people who think they “know” what is best for Aboriginals and not to people who think they “understand” what the Aboriginal community needs. Those people have zero incentive to actually help because their income depends on the continued suffering of the Aboriginal community.

The most profound issue facing the Aboriginal community is the crisis in parenting. Not every Aboriginal went to residential schools, and of those who did go, many were able to overcome the abuse they suffered and go on to lead productive lives and raise loving families. But many, many more were utterly broken by the experience.

Here’s how to fix it: dismantle the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, take all that money, and give it to the Aboriginal community. There are tens of thousands of successful, accomplished, knowledgeable Aboriginal people across the country. Let the Aboriginal people themselves choose their leaders, however they wish. Let them choose how to educate their children, pick their own curriculum, meet their own social services needs. The Ministry of Education is designed to produce corporate drones and bureaucrats, and to the best of my knowledge, there exists no history of pointless paper shuffling in Aboriginal culture. The curriculum forced on Aboriginal children is stupid, pointless and utterly ineffective, but I will bet the entire federal budget that the Aboriginal community contains thousands of individuals who know exactly how to engage Aboriginal children in a way that honors, respects and loves them.

Let the Aboriginal community tackle the crisis in parenting. There are a number of ways they could do it. Right now, families that are torn apart by addiction and violence have their children taken by the state, which merely replicates and reinforces the residential schooling history. I can imagine an Aboriginal community that responds to child abuse and neglect not by removing children, but by adding a stable member to the family to provide a role-model. A member who shares their experiences, culture and understands their suffering. I can also imagine an Israeli-style kibbutz situation, where families that struggle to care for children can live collectively, surrounded by members of their own community who have tackled the same issues and defeated them. I can imagine lots of ways the Aboriginal community might collectively work together to teach the broken ones how to mend themselves and restore the traditional, deeply knit and loving communities they once were before their children were stolen and destroyed.

I don’t imagine for one second that the Aboriginal community doesn’t love their boys and men. Yet this focus on Aboriginal women at the expense of men and boys is spreading across the community like a virus. Divisive forces are succeeding at pitting Aboriginal women against Aboriginal men, and that is a tragedy. It is exactly the tactic liberals and feminists used to destroy the Black community, with great effect, and countless numbers of liberal arts grads are now employed administering vital social services to that devastated demographic.

Aboriginal women who align themselves with liberal, white feminists are absolutely insane to think those people are going to help them. They are not. They earn their living off the suffering of Aboriginal people. All the money flowing into the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, intended to help repair the devastating history of the Aboriginal community is being used to clothe and feed and house non-Aboriginal children and provide income and work for adults who essentially have no marketable skills other than doing clerical work in air-conditioned offices.

It’s always the same: follow the money.

Aboriginal women are making a huge mistake embracing liberal white feminism. The concepts of patriarchy and male privilege are particularly egregious when applied to the Aboriginal population. Patriarchy is the notion that men are to blame for their own oppression and their own condition. Think about that in the context of what happened to Aboriginal children.

The little boy who was kidnapped, had his hair cut off, was beaten for speaking his own language and raped repeatedly is privileged somehow? It was patriarchy that caused that to happen? As a male he somehow benefits from his gender?

Think about how heartless, soulless and utterly cruel that is.

It saddens me deeply to see accomplished, concerned Aboriginal women embrace feminism and stand beside the very people who are pocketing huge chunks of money intended to help Aboriginal families, and who are never going to voluntarily stop. And they won’t have to stop if they can convince you to blame the men and boys of your own community for the tragic legacy of the residential schools. Aboriginal women will never see their communities and families restored until they come to the realization that feminism is a profitable ideology that stands on the backs of the broken and blames the broken ones for their own problems, as long as they are male.

Fixing the Aboriginal community can only be done by the Aboriginal community itself. Men and women together. Align your interests with those who profit from your suffering, and I guarantee you, they will do everything possible to make sure your suffering continues.

Feminists do that by convincing Aboriginal women that Aboriginal men are their enemies.

They are not.

They are your sons, your brothers, your fathers, your uncles, your nephews, your grandfathers, your friends. They are your people, and they are hurting, too.

All Aboriginal lives matter.

If Aboriginal women allow feminists to convince them that loving men and boys is not important, they are lost.

Lots of love,

JB