Given the violence, dispossession, and virulent racism indigenous people are and we’re forced to bear, isn’t the alcoholism another symptom, not the cause?
Similar groups in various other arctic locations throughout the globe have abuse and suicide rates that are only marginally lower. Further the greatest number of victims are youth.
Living like it's the 1700s only works if you aren't aware that the rest of the world exists. Put youth in very remote locations and teach them that maintaining a lost culture is their most important reason for existing -- but they're aware of a wide world that will embrace them [^1] yet they're told that it reviles them -- and it has to be pretty self-defeating. Add horrendous weather most of the year, harsh conditions, and it just isn't conducive to happiness.
^1 - Aboriginal racism comes up a lot, and rightly so. But it's often a stereotype of reserves and remote communities (one very sadly backed by data -- if you live near a reserve, property crime is likely significantly higher than if you didn't), and not about a peoples. Canada is a very multicultural society and any of these people would be just another shade in Canada, but because of the clutching to the "old ways", much as if I was wearing a Kilt and trying to raise sheep, it's tough to do and these youth bear the burden of their ancestors more than most of us do.
Put youth in very remote locations and teach them that maintaining a lost culture is their most important reason for existing
It must be hard to have that put on you. The outside people who express the most interest in your welfare seem bent on curating you like an artifact. Meanwhile, there's very little economy if you want to stay, and if you go, you'll be going into a partly alien culture where you know you will encounter bias.
Speaking about America rather than Canada, I think to most Americans the idea of ethnic bias against Native Americans seems like "just" a matter of the quaint and damaging stereotypes we carry, but near reservations it takes a similar form to racism against African-Americans: fear and resentment of the socioeconomic issues in the community, fear and resentment of the historical culpability of white people, an implicit assumption that something must be inferior about them because white people operating under the same historical burden would have had it all straightened out by now. If I were a young person on a reservation judging white people by the ones I encountered nearby, I think it would make leaving into a predominately white world a scary prospect.
> Living like it's the 1700s only works if you aren't aware that the rest of the world exists. Put youth in very remote locations and teach them that maintaining a lost culture is their most important reason for existing -- but they're aware of a wide world that will embrace them [^1] yet they're told that it reviles them -- and it has to be pretty self-defeating. Add horrendous weather most of the year, harsh conditions, and it just isn't conducive to happiness.
You’re describing the outcome of a centuries long, at many points explicitly genocidal, settler-colonialist project and then hand-washing it away as “clinging to the old ways.” These circumstances are literally what was designed for indigenous people in Canada by those who have profited from the dispossession, not those of their choosing. I don’t think indigenous people are backward or inherently inferior. I think Canada lies about its own history and crimes against these people, and then projects its own blame upon them.
"I don’t think indigenous people are backward or inherently inferior."
Weird that you drop this bizarre and incredibly offensive statement.
Countless indigenous people are simply Canadians. They live in cities, have jobs, and are enjoying lives as normal Canadians. Many Canadians have often significant aboriginal ancestry in their blood. People just living as a mixed bag of peoples in one of the richer countries on the Earth, enjoying life.
What I'm talking about are very remote settlements and reservations. This is situational, not about genetics. The situation of reservations and those far flung settlements just isn't conducive to happiness. No amount of government spending will change that.
>No amount of government spending will change that.
Why not buy them bus tickets to Ontario? There's some value in preserving cultures as a matter of record, but that's not worth unnecessary suffering to make it happen.
You do not deserve to be downvoted. People live in remote villages for a variety of reasons. Nobody "puts" them there any more than I "put" my son in the town I live in.
GP may have had a better intention with their comment, but the way it was worded is extremely ignorant of what it's actually like to be born into a remote community that has existed for thousands of years.
