Indigenous rights vs property rights: Straightgoods.com Date: Sat, 9 Sep 2006 12:30:35 -0500 (CDT) X-Sender-Host-Name: chumbly.math.missouri.edu X-Spam-Class: HAM-VERY-WHITELIST from: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature6.cfm?REF=506 Property rights vs democracy The Canadian Taxpayer Federation has no right to decide how Indigenous Peoples should own their land. Dateline: Tuesday, September 05, 2006 by Stewart Steinhauer Nitans sent a link to a little something she saw on CBC's News website, and bumped it along to me for comment, particularly Tanis Fiss' statement, extracted and quoted below. The news story ran under the headline: Native leaders, groups reject proposed native gaming fund Last Updated: Friday, August 25, 2006, 9:43 AM CT CBC News 7a2374.jpg The part I extracted and reprinted is here: Tanis Fiss, an aboriginal affairs spokeswoman with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said Thursday the fund won't solve First Nations' economic woes. "This is just a Band-Aid solution to try and increase economic development within native communities, as well as the living conditions," Fiss said. "But for that really to happen we have to change the system of aboriginal affairs in Canada, and that would mean phasing out the reserve system and establishing a system of private property rights." Fiss said the province's resources would better go into lobbying the federal government to make those changes. My comments: First of all who is this Tanis Fiss person? I guess a trip to the Calgary offices of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a front for a right wing big business lobby group, is in order. The corporate media, including CBC, run to "experts" for comment, and Tanis Fiss is one of those experts relied upon to make public comment. It pays to advertise. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is a public relations entity being paid to push a right wing business agenda. All that said, try substituting the word "indigenous" for the word "private" in Tanis Fiss' statement above, as in "indigenous property rights", and it could be me talking. The vested interests who heavily fund Ms Fs and the CTF want to see a safe and smooth transition from the Rez system to just plain old fee simple private property based on the Crown's assertion of root title, so that indigenous Peoples can truly become "ethnic Canadians of Aboriginal ancestry", an identity which Ms Fs apparently already possesses. I don't have any problem at all with those indigenous folks who wish to take Canada up on its offer of destroying their original national identity and forcibly imposing a new national identity; after all, it takes all kinds to make the world go round. Respect for diversity is one thing, but the one little niggling question in the hindquarters of what's left of my mind is: whatever happened to the notion of freely given fully informed consent, as in "democracy"? Neither I, nor the vast majority of indigenous folks I personally know, agree with Tanis Fiss' position. I don't have any problem with her being an "ethnic Canadian of aboriginal ancestry". I just have to point out the obvious and say that the group she apparently speaks for doesn't include the overwhelming majority of indigenous folks condemned at birth to live inside of Canada's Rez Zone, specifically the folks she refers to in the comment above. No matter what anyone else might say, I'm Nehiyaw, and a member of a non-nation state nation that continues to exist despite Canada's best efforts, on territories stretching from the Peace River block in northern BC to the east coast of the Labrador, in a contiguous strip of land that, outside of Nunavut and the other northern territories, constitutes the majority of the land base claimed by Canada through its "Crown". By the way, "the Crown" is a quaint reference to an archaic Middle Ages western European practice called "monarchy". The Crown's claim is illegal, and that makes the Crown's occupation of indigenous territories theft, but no court of law exists in the current world order to provide effective remedy to the victims of the Crown's theft.... whole article at: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature6.cfm?REF=506 Penney Kome, author and journalist http://penneykome.ca Editor, Straight Goods, http://straightgoods.com [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/octet-stream which had a name of 7a2374.jpg]