Filed under: Aboriginal issues, First Nations, First Nations issues, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous rights, Indigenous wisdom, Uncategorized | Tags: DIAND, First Nations policy in Canada, INAC, Indian Affairs
There are basically two types of people who work for the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa: xenophobic scum and naive puppets who eventually become xenophobic scum.
Indian Affairs employees would have made great Nazis—so exacting, so hateful, so policy-driven.
They are people with graduate degrees who lack any imagination or purpose, except to work diligently towards the most lucrative pension they can get.
These are the people who form and administer Native policy in Canada. On the street, they would be the ones who load the dice and pretend to shuffle the deck to continuously dupe unsuspecting generations.
They are the colonizers.
For all the political activity in the Native community, very little is known about the department of Indian Affairs, yet they are the ones who continue to hold the purse strings of power.
Indian Affairs does not give any real power to those who work in the regional offices because, according to their internal logic, the face-to-face contact the regional employees have with actual First Nations people would compromise their loyalty to the Crown.
Indian Affairs sends its best negotiators to deal with the Blackfoot and Blood Nations in southern Alberta because they are the most educated First Nations and they send their most junior associates to deal with the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation and other First Nations they deem to have “capacity issues” (their internal code for lack of formal education at the leadership level).
Before First Nations go and sign treaties, they should first know that the Indian Affairs treaty negotiation budget dwarfs the treaty implementation budget (i.e. they spend far more to negotiate with First Nations than they do to honor the treaties they sign).
The government of Canada has never fully honored any treaty it has signed with any First Nation.
For all the shortsightedness and myopia in Ottawa, the department of Indian Affairs is ironically the only department that thinks seven generations into the future. This blue-printed future is one in which there is no longer a department of Indian Affairs because they plan on wiping us out –on paper.
What good can we as First Nations people take from the existence of Indian Affairs?
As people from many diverse and sometimes rival First Nations, Indian Affairs provides a common enemy for us to fight against. After all, colonization is a big stick that beats us all indiscriminately regardless of whether we’re Tsimshian, Cree or Mohawk.
Besides that, I can’t think of much else Indian Affairs is good for.
Filed under: Aboriginal issues, First Nations, First Nations issues, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous wisdom, Native American culture, Native American issues, Native Peoples, culture, leisure, life | Tags: long hair
My three-year experiment with long hair ended yesterday when I cut it off.
Going to the mall in Surrey to see my reliable hairstylist was a very liberating experience.
I went from having braidable hair to essentially a brush cut without any regrets.
Going to the local swimming pool will be a lot easier without dealing with the tangles, the conditioner, and blow-dryers that never dry fast enough.
Talking to elders about the significance of long hair left me without any real reason to keep it long. Basically, no one was able to give me a good enough reason for keeping my hair long. Long hair does not make a man more spiritual.
The ones most disappointed by this news will be those who subscribe to outdated romantic ideals of the Native man.
I’ve determined that hair styles for Native men follow convention and style, just as they do for every other culture in the world. What’s convenient in one century becomes inconvenient in another.
Although it’s still considered traditional in many First Nations cultures for men to keep their hair long, that tradition is not really based on much of anything other than following a style that was trendy a couple hundred years ago (for cross-cultural examples please see muttonchops and powdered wigs).
It’s become mostly symbolic of having pride in your heritage as a Native man. However, when you break down most symbols and analyze them within the context of history and other factors, they start to lose their mystique.
There are plenty of other ways to show pride in your First Nations culture than to just focus on the hair. There are both deep and superficial ways to express one’s culture, and I’ve always been more comfortable in the deep end of the pool.
Even though James Brown, the godfather of soul, almost always straightened his hair, black people still look to him as a man of black pride. He didn’t have to have an afro to garner this respect.
For me, it was a nice experiment, but ultimately I needed a more athletic hair-cut to avoid getting soft in the belly.
Don’t worry: the short hair cut has done little to keep me from communing with the mystical and the spiritual aspects of existence.
Filed under: Aboriginal issues, Environment, First Nations, First Nations issues, Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous rights, Indigenous wisdom, Native American culture, Native American issues, Native Peoples, coaching, communication, culture, diabetes, emotional health, family, health, leisure, life, love, protest, residential school, residential school syndrome, self-help, women | Tags: First Nations, Aboriginal, Indigenous, health, self-help, self-improvement, family, protest, self-esteem, culture, Canada, Aboriginal dating, First Nations dating, relationships, Indigenous health, Aboriginal health, Indigenous wisdom, First Nations health, Native American issues, Aboriginal issues, love, Native self-esteem, Aboriginal self-esteem, First Nations self-esteem, Native American self-esteem, residential school syndrome, Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Issues, self-love, holistic health, Native American culture, Native American wisdom, Aboriginal health workshops, wellness workshops, post-colonial theory, First Nations issues, Turtle Island, healthy diet, bannock, bannock power, bannock recipes, tasty and delicious, post-colonial diet, addiction, food addiction
Bannock: we love it because it tastes good.
Baked or fried, with raisins or without, it’s the one food that bonds us together here on Turtle Island.
We love it because it anchors us to our childhood. I can think back to many meals of fried moose-meat (sauteed with onions and mushrooms), mashed potatoes, baked beans, hot tea and bannock. Especially on cold days, those were always the best meals. Meals like that symbolize my Mom’s love.
When we eat bannock, we can’t help but feel a connection with our Indigenous heritage. Bannock is what got many of our grandparents and great-grandparents through cold winters and trying times. Bannock served them well.
For those of you not in the know, bannock is a popular bread made by Native Peoples throughout Canada and the United States. It consists of flour, lard, baking powder and water. There are some variations on the ingredients, but that’s generally what goes into it.
You’ll find bannock being served at most pow-wows. It’s also known as fry-bread or Indian bread. Native women are very competitive when it comes to making the best bannock. Reputation quickly spreads. Just as everyone knows a community’s toughest guy, they also know the woman who makes the best bannock.
Now the bad news about bannock: it’s probably the worst food in terms of nutrition.
For a People who struggle with heart disease and diabetes, bannock unleashes a slow and lethal combination of clogging our arteries and shooting up our blood sugar levels.
Some people think they’re being healthy by making it with whole wheat flour, but it doesn’t really make it healthy. It’s like cooking up crystal meth without the drano and adding vitamin C instead.
This is an example of the many lies we tell ourselves and others about what we eat and our levels of exercise being more than healthy even when it’s the furthest thing from the truth. Talk with any obese person and most of them will try to convince you that they’re eating a healthy diet, even as they’re holding deep-fried food up to their mouths.
As Native People, we really don’t need any additional help in getting diabetes. And we can’t continue the perpetual lies about our diet at the expense of our health.
Let’s get real!
Looking at our history, bannock is not even Native in origin. It originated in Scotland over a thousand years ago. It only became popular when our ancestors grew to depend on government rations for survival.
In many ways, bannock symbolizes our colonization. We enjoy eating bannock in the same way we enjoy watching TV: we know it’s bad for us but we do it anyways.
Eating bannock encouraged us to break from generations of hunting and gathering to eek out alien, sedentary and largely dependent lives.
Government dependence didn’t happen overnight.
It’s okay to acknowledge bannock’s place in our history, but now is the time to embrace a new diet and a stronger concept of who we are–independent of the Crown.
