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The New Trail of Tears. Naomi Schaefer Riley
Читать онлайн.Название The New Trail of Tears
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781594038549
Автор произведения Naomi Schaefer Riley
Жанр Учебная литература
Издательство Ingram
“You don’t see big permanent structure leases for less than 15 years,” Le Dressay tells me as we drive around the Indian side of the water. On the side that’s not a reserve, homes sell for more than half a million dollars, but here the most profit to be made off the land is from a trailer park. Since the band has no money, they’re unable to create the public parks and other facilities you see on the other side of Kamloops. They’re barely able to keep up with the projects they do oversee. The cemetery holds victims of the 1860 smallpox epidemic as well as veterans of the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, but it looks overgrown. The local Catholic church is undergoing a much-needed renovation, but the houses around it are falling apart.
In another attempt to work around the land problem, some First Nations have arrangements whereby a bank will give band members a mortgage, but if the members default, the band itself is on the hook for the money. The results are predictable: the Kamloops band is paying more than $2 million a year in arrears. And it’s not only the mortgage payments that are the problem, it’s the upkeep. Le Dressay tells me that the “average lifespan of a tribal home is 15 years.” That is, homes are so poorly cared for that they need to be completely demolished and rebuilt after only 15 years.
There’s one large gated community on the Indian side of the river. The tribe came to a complex agreement with a developer for a 99-year lease on the land. The community has its own restaurant and golf course, and plenty of non-Indians have purchased homes here.
But for every successful development project, there are several others that have fallen through. Twenty years ago, a plan for a big hotel and residential development brought together seven or eight landowners, Le Dressay recalls. “But it took so long to get the regulatory approvals and the environmental approvals that the lenders got nervous. One of the front men eventually committed suicide because of all the pressure. It never took off.” Studies by Fiscal Realities have found that development on the Indian side of the river takes, on average, four to six times longer than development on land off the reserve.35
Jules supports a parliamentary proposal, the First Nations Property Ownership Act, which would address this problem by allowing First Nations to have title to their own lands instead of having the Canadian federal government hold those lands in trust. But “one of the biggest challenges we face in convincing people about [the First Nations Property Ownership Act] is mythology,” says Le Dressay. “The popular understanding of indigenous culture is that it’s almost like there was a socialist utopia for millennia.” But such a utopia never existed. As Le Dressay notes, “In any other circumstances such a society would have been impossible – unless you consider North Korea a success story.” But people continue to impose this history on First Nations, as if they’re exceptions to human nature.
A lot of the literature on First Nations’ history and traditions was written in the 1960s and 1970s – a time when environmentalism and socialism were surging in the West. More was contributed in the 1980s, a time of political correctness, when scholars pushed the notion that traditional cultures were far ahead of the dominant Western one because of their communalist impulses.
After engaging in extensive research on his own communities and others in Canada, the United States, and Mexico, Jules has come to the conclusion that this is all bunk. “Property rights are part of indigenous culture,” he tells me in no uncertain terms. As he explains, “In my community, we have some of the oldest pit house sites.” Pit houses were permanent structures requiring considerable time and resources to build. “They were nice and toasty warm in the winter. In the summer we went out and gathered salmon, berries, wild vegetables, and hunted game. In the winter we came back to settled villages. There is no way we would have left and come back to allow some other family to live in our pit house.”
And yet political leaders and educators continue to offer sentimental myths in place of this history. Michelle Obama recently told a gathering of Native American youth, “Long before the United States was even an idea, your ancestors were harvesting the crops that would feed the world for centuries to come” and “Today on issues like conservation and climate change, we are finally beginning to embrace the wisdom of your ancestors.”36
Mrs. Obama hasn’t discovered some ancient Indian text that predicted the melting of the glaciers. And there’s little evidence that Indians had any fundamentally different understanding of the environment than any other people on Earth. Which is to say, when resources were scarce, Natives worked to conserve them. When resources weren’t scarce, they didn’t.
Take, for instance, the oft-repeated notion that Indians would “use every part of the animal” – because of their concern for nature and their desire not to waste its treasures. History doesn’t back that up. In a 2002 article called “Buffaloed: The Myth and Reality of Bison in America,” historian Larry Schweikart notes that some Indian tribes cleared large amounts of forest with “controlled burns” for hunting purposes. They would divert game into small, unburned areas to make it easier to hunt the animals.37
As if that weren’t bad enough from an “environmental” perspective, Schweikart says, the intentional fires “often got out of control, and without modern firefighting equipment, flashed through forests, destroying everything in their path. Deer, beaver and birds of all sorts were already on a trajectory to extinction in some areas, because over and above the hunting done by Indians, natural predators and disasters thinned herds.” Other hunting methods included the “buffalo jump,” in which a man would drive an entire herd over a cliff. As Schweikart notes, this “led to horrible waste and inefficient use of resources.” When buffalo were plentiful, they were hunted without regard to waste. When their numbers dwindled, things changed.38
To the extent that Native Americans of old cared about conservation, it was when they owned things. Jules notes that the same is true of the Natives who lived in Canada, saying, “The teepees were owned by individual women.” He leans in to emphasize the point. “The concept that we never had private property has been foisted upon us.” It’s interesting that in revisionist academics’ attempts to suggest that First Nations are more advanced due to their communal attitudes, they’ve actually “reinforced the notion that we are not as advanced as somebody else, as Western culture.”
Jules believes that the time for passively accepting the status quo is over. During three decades of involvement in tribal leadership, he has tried to significantly alter federal policy toward Indians, creating greater political and economic autonomy for First Nations. He has worked with other leaders to develop political clout, so that the Canadian government can’t ignore them.
Self-sufficiency has become Jules’s mantra for the Kamloops band and for all the First Nations of Canada. He seems to have the right combination of experience and optimism to make changes happen in his community. Jules’s father, a logger and a cowboy who could, according to Jules, “ride from the time he could walk,” set up the first industrial park on a Canadian reserve. In 1963, 14 businesses opened there, but the logistical problems of doing business on the reserve immediately became obvious: Jules’s father had a tough time getting anyone to plow the roads in winter. The province claimed that snow removal was the federal government’s responsibility – because the reserve was federal land – but the federal government said it was the province’s responsibility because the province collected taxes on the land.39 This controversy led to a decades-long fight with the Canadian government – specifically over issues of taxation, but more broadly about political and economic autonomy for First Nations.
In 1988, thanks to Jules’s leadership in calling for reform, Parliament passed “The Kamloops Amendment,” the first-ever First Nation–led change to the Indian Act. The Indian Act has regulated the 614 First Nation bands in Canada ever since it was passed in 1876. The Kamloops Amendment established the power of governments of First Nations to levy property taxes on reserves, including taxes on leasehold developments like the industrial