I am weighing in on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s speech at the UN, where he spent his time talking about the history of our people.
Yes, I am a First Nation person, and I find it disingenuous that he would go to great lengths to discuss our history when his own father attempted to introduce what was called the White Paper — which would virtually extinguish the Indian Act. The price to First Nations would also have extinguished accountability for more than 150 years of what his son calls “abuse,” where my ancestors’ villages were burned, our people were often moved from main waterways to make room for the Hudson’s Bay Company and isolated — out of sight and out of mind.
So he is still talking about no drinking water, no proper housing, no transportation to reduce the risk of more men and women going missing or being murdered , discriminatory funding for social programs, education and health, and prisons over-represented with First Nations for misdemeanors due to the lack of legal representation.
Ever since the Idle No More movement and social media showing Canadians what a government-created reserve looks like up close and personal, government can’t hide the neglect and must admit 200 years of failures.
The seven-year findings from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission broke the secrets of residential-school abuse, First Nations children being used for medical experiments, children being removed, beaten and killed for trying to stay connected to family and culture, and parents being threatened with jail if they refused to turn over children. Since the commission released the findings of a culture of abuse, nothing has changed.
We have a prime minister using the UN to tell the world about Canadian failures. Yet they just can’t find a path to fast-track change.
I encourage Trudeau to read the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which covers Canada’s failures. His address was to a small audience, so while he ignored what is going on around the world, where Myanmar is accused of ethnic cleansing, a U.S. president is threatening world peace with ignorant rhetoric, North Korea is taking terrorist action, and Canada has broken a promise to send peacekeeping troops to protect those who are facing what is happening in Myanmar, most countries at the UN ignored him and rightly so.
While our prime minister claims it is not up to him to comment on what’s going on around the world at the United Nations — though this is exactly the place world leaders weigh in on our “global community” — he chose to resurrect and preach about a 200-year failure in Canada. Perhaps if he were serious about fixing the relations between First Nations and government, industry and the citizens of Canada, he would stop talking and start doing.
My First Nation opinion is that once again he used our people and our plight for no other purpose than playing politics on the world stage. His actions at this world meeting should serve as a warning of what will happen with NAFTA. Does he have it in him to be tough and stand up against other countries?
Jo-Anne Berezanski lives in North Saanich.
