Dear Editor:
Your opinion piece in the Jan. 16 edition of the Ponoka News, asserting “Natives need honest leadership from within,” made one useful point, while totally ignoring another.
We can all agree that a protesting group’s profile is stronger if their hands are clean of any potentially nefarious financial dealings with the funds afforded them by various levels of government. As an additional black mark, the character of Chief Theresa Spence is questioned at a personal level as well. Put that together with the increasingly inconvenient nature of the Idle No More’s activities and it’s difficult not to see this article as a total discrediting of the movement’s origins and goals.
I would like to point out, even to underline, that in the past months and years, the list of private corporate executives (mainly non-aboriginal), government ministers all non-aboriginal) and elected officials — federal, provincial and municipal — in Alberta and other provinces, almost all of which are non-aboriginal, have been convicted of various levels of fraud, mismanagement, deceit, mendacity and just plain greed, is almost as long as this sentence. Padded expense accounts, ignoring of the legalities of their mandate by oil companies — all these things are the stuff of daily news regularly.
However, I do not see this paper, or any other regional publication, urging us to discount the position of the province, municipality or even the federal government simply because there are those within it who are alleged thieves, or whose personal lives are messier than we think they should be.
Idle No More, and Theresa Spence raises hackles because they are aboriginal expressions, because they don’t intend to play by the rules laid down by the majority white society, and because they take aim at nefarious practices of our elected rulers to avoid democratic processes (with omnibus bills that cannot be properly debated). They also demand discussions around the various treaties made with them by the British Queen and largely ignored by non-aboriginal corporation and governments.
An angry native woman in your face on the QE2 makes a stronger point about discontent and rage, than a nice, soft-spoken native quietly holding up a sign in front of a government building, from which all the inhabitants have departed.
Let’s remember how rude and in-your-face the civil rights movement of the Sixties and Seventies got before anyone paid any attention to the plight of the black community. I think we’d better get used to Idle No More and pay attention to what it’s less than perfect proponents are saying. They aren’t going away anytime soon.
James Strachan