The last couple of weeks offered contrasting glimpses of how white and aboriginal cultures see themselves.
In Ontario, a court ruled in favour of a First Nations mother who wanted her daughter’s chemotherapy halted. The 11-year old child has acute lymphoblastic leukemia — essentially a death sentence without chemotherapy. But her mother argued that Canada’s constitution guarantees native people the right to use traditional healing methods. The court agreed.
“This is a precedent-setting decision … for our people across the country,” said an aboriginal chief after the ruling.
Peter Fitzgerald, president of McMaster Children’s hospital, struck a more sombre tone: “We’ve made it very clear from the beginning that without conventional therapy there is no chance of survival.” Doctors had given the child better than 90 per cent odds of success if she continued the course of treatment.
I confess my heart sank as I read the court’s ruling. I understand the desire of native communities to preserve their heritage. But can it really be that our constitution enjoins such a fateful decision?
Canada’s First Nations often complain, with complete justification, that their treaties have been dishonoured or ignored. Here we have the opposite extreme. Constitutional provisions intended to safeguard native peoples are being enforced down to the last letter of the law, with no regard for the consequences.
Where is the judgment we expect in such matters? Where indeed is the humanity? In circumstances like this, a mindset too respectful of tradition can be a dangerous thing.
Let me turn now to a quite different event. A fortnight ago, five native kids left Southend in Saskatchewan to hunt moose.
The community is at the southwest end of Reindeer Lake, which is in the northeast corner of the province. The youngsters, aged 13 to 17 — four boys and a girl — set out in a small open boat to hunt along the shoreline.
Let’s pause for a moment to grasp what this entailed. The lake is immense — 6,500 square kilometres. That’s larger than a couple of American states.
Freeze-up was imminent, the wind was howling, air temperatures had dropped to -15C. They had only the most rudimentary survival gear with them.
The exact sequence of events is unclear — various versions of the facts have been published. But their outboard lost power and as they headed for land, the boat foundered in waves more than two metres high.
Three of the kids fell into the frigid water, while the other two struggled to pull them ashore. All were soaked to the skin.
That night, they built a fire, dried their clothes and huddled under a tarpaulin. The next day, they found a boat at a nearby hunting cabin and crossed the lake to a small island with a fishing lodge on it.
Here they hunkered down and waited for the next five days until a rescue aircraft spotted them. They made it home in good health.
That, in my mind, is what aboriginal culture and values truly mean. What a performance.
They had every reason to panic. There were numerous bad choices just waiting to be made.
They should all have been dead from hypothermia. But they lived. How many kids from down south would have made it through that first night?
That’s more than knowing how to survive in the bush, or how to start a fire with snow on the ground. That is sheer toughness — mental toughness, spiritual toughness, toughness of body and mind.
You can’t teach that in a classroom. It comes from a tradition of closeness to the land that creates its own meaning.
White urban culture has lost these attributes, by and large. We’ve become pampered, querulous and soft.
What happened in that Ontario courtroom, I fear, was a tragedy. The miracle on Reindeer Lake was a vindication.
