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The Aboriginal School, Perpetuates the Problem

By 250 News

Years ago my son attended Van Tech in east Vancouver, a school with a nasty reputation for gangs, etc. He came home one day complaining that his grades were due to his aboriginal ancestory and that the school wasn't giving him a fair chance. I quickly sat him down and said, "You're failure in school has nothing to do with the teachers, your peers or the perceived difficulties you've experienced through childhood. It has to do entirely with your attitude. Take a good look around you tomorrow at school, carefully observe your fellow schoolmates. You'll see kids that barely speak english yet they are straight A students. Some of those kids have gone through horrors you could never dream of; families raped and murdered before their very eyes, poverty so extreme that it's a miracle they even survived, years spent in refugee camps in absolute squallor... yet they excel and you don't. Why? Because they want to - and you don't. I didn't raise you to be lazy or to extort a welfare existence from society.

The world owes you nothing, nada, sweet bugger all. The reality is, that given the chance, it will steal all you own. If you are not personally driven to take what you can from all aspects of life, you have no right to complain about failure because you have never really even tried. Instead of dwelling, and wasting valuable time, on obstacles - get tough, get mad, get whatever you have to in order to motivate you to accept nothing less than success."

"Our people (the Seminole and Osage nations) were the only native peoples discovered in North America to have a written language, a legal system, to practice agriculture, etc. We were civilized for thousands of years before the European invasion of North America. Our tribe is currently the richest Indian tribe in the world, with assets ranging into the many billions of dollars. These assets were not negotiated, handed to us on a silver platter or gained by senseless decades of pathetic whining. They were earned by sound leadership that evolved from our chiefs watching thousands of our people starve and die on the Trail of Tears, from negotiating with governments who treated them as animals, savages and neanderthals.

Our chiefs negotiated treaty after treaty, only to have each broken at the will of the government. Finally they said that enough was enough, and negotiated the treaty that still exists today, a treaty so cunningly designed by our leaders that the government could not break it again. They agreed to live on land that no white person would willingly want, and used its resources (oil and natural gas) to plummet themselves into the world of high finance. They reinvested their earnings to build casinos, malls, buy corporations across the United States and then went global - using their companies to discover and develop fuel and mineral resources worldwide.

Today our nation does not depend on any government, it stands proudly with the sun shining warmly on its face, taking its rightful place as equal to persons of all nations. Our people are some of the best educated in the world, with the rate of university graduation unparalled by any other aboriginal people. Our people have competed and excelled in all venues of life; religion, theatre arts and business. We are what we are becuse we refused to be belittled, treated as incompetent wards of a racist government. So go back to school tomorrow with your head held high, proud of who you are and confident that you will succeed. Belief will guide you, motivate you and reassure you no matter what obstacles you encounter."

Today he has his education, his own house and a good paying job. Not because it was handed to him, but because he earned it. As my adopted Ojibwa grandfather once told me, "Give an Indian a house, a car or anything else and he will destroy it. Tell him he can't have it and he will move heaven and earth to prove you wrong". There is no pride in begging, unless it is the pride of being an effective beggar. There is no honor in being native if you have to force people to honor you. There is no point of asking to be an equal if you seek to segregate yourself.

Those who seek to (re)establish an Aboriginal School are ignorant racists. They are blinded by what they perceive as a duty to assist those "poor pathetic Indians". They base their ideas on scholastic stupidity perpetuated by generations of racists who believe(d) they know what's best for Aboriginals. They are wrong. They have assembled a team of do-gooder non-aboriginals and apples (persons red on the outside and white on the inside) who represent a miniscule fraction of society and who have been granted validity that they will never earn and certainly do not deserve. Instead of working to solve the root problem -aboriginal lifestyle - they seek to use taxpayer's money on a facade designed to alleviate their guilt. Therefore I state the following:

As a person of aboriginal descent I am upset with the proposal to build an "Aboriginal Education Centre" in Prince George. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, racism has become the primary Aboriginal economic engine in Canada. Building a segregated "Aboriginal Education Centre" is just another example. School Board 57 trustee, Michelle Marrelli, stated, "When the graduation rate for aboriginal students is still only 42 per cent, it is the structure of the current system that must be failing to meet their needs. We need to make a radical change."

I agree that radical change is necessary, but the current misguided efforts school trustees, politicians and aboriginal leaders is not the answer.

The reality is that we've been institutionalized since the European invasion of North America and have evolved our entire culture to be economically and socially dependent on racism, and racist legislation. Instead of being encouraged to live and compete on an equal basis, aboriginals have historically been treated as "special needs" persons, incapable of living from our own initiative. We are encouraged to live in aboriginal ghettos called "reserves" that have the highest suicide, substance abuse, educational dropout and unemployment rates of all Canadian communities.

Throughout history Aboriginal leaders who opposed these racist policies were imprisoned, bought out, exiled or murdered. The system that needs changing is not educational, it is the social fabric of aboriginal lives. Our heroes are no longer our elders, artists, warriors and shamans - they are now those who can squeeze ever more funding out of the taxpayers purse. The "better beggar" currently controls aboriginal destiny, with no regard for the social change necessary for our people to evolve with dignity and purpose. Building a racist educational institution with a "watered down curriculum" is not the answer, it merely perpetuates the problem.

Racial segregation is the practice of restricting people to certain circumscribed areas of residence or to separate institutions (e.g., schools, churches) and facilities on the basis of race or alleged race. Racial segregation provides a means of maintaining the economic advantages and superior social status of the politically dominant group to maintain their ascendancy over other groups by means of legal and social colour bars.

Shame on you non-aboriginal and aboriginal "leaders" who work to segregate us. You are an insult to a once proud and noble people, to yourselves, your families, your nation and to the entire human race.

-Will Lewis
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