What's The Matter With Our Indians?
"Never criticize someone else unless you walk a mile in his moccasins."
- Lakota Sioux proverb
To begin, let's examine the title.
Five hundred years after Christopher Columbus (Christophe Colomb, an Italian cartographer of some considerable renown) defrauded his Spanish sponsors into believing that he had discovered India--naming the inhabitants he found "Indians"--many people still call the aboriginal peoples of North America Indians. By the way, Columbus didn't "discover" the Americas. Being a map maker, he had spoken on many occasions with Norse map makers who had been to North America many times with Norse fishermen who had been visiting the continent for hundreds of years. Thus began the great North American fraud, but more on that later.
The aboriginal people of North America sometimes call themselves Indians, but they aren't serious about it. African Americans sometimes call themselves "niggahs" too, but as a people they don't care for the moniker any more than the aboriginals like whites to call them Indians. "Indians" is a bad name given them by ignorant Europeans whose primary purpose in coming to North America was to steal and to conquer. They called it discovering, exploring, trading, but let's use plain language here. They planned to take as much as possible and give as little as they could get away with. It was the European way of the time.
"Our" is wrong as well. What are called Native Americans in the USA and First Nations in Canada were never conquered, never defeated as a people. Of the hundreds of distinct tribal groups--at least the ones that were not slaughtered to extinction (Beothuk, the original "redskins" that lived in Newfoundland) or decimated as they tried to defend themselves in "Indian wars"--none were truly defeated. They didn't have any concept of "owning" land, so they were prepared to share it with the newcomers. Since the newcomers themselves were not decimated by such delightful diseases as smallpox that the Europeans delivered, the white skins soon outnumbered the natives. As always, size (of population) matters.
So far as aboriginal peoples of North America are concerned, even today, they are Americans or Canadians only according to citizenship documents they may have needed for travel purposes. They consider themselves citizens of their own nations, as promised them in treaties written for them by English speaking lawyers, in English legalese, explained to them in simple but deceptive language they could understand. The English speakers had no leave to negotiate, so it was a "take it or leave it" situation. This matters because in most of these cultures no one forces another to say "No" to anything and it is considered very rude to be forced into saying "No" yourself by another person. The aboriginals agreed to treaties partly because their culture taught them to be agreeable, to not say "No" to someone who is offering something.
They were tricked into giving up "ownership" of their land (a concept they never had in their culture) by Europeans who promised them homes on land they would control ("reserved" land, thus called reserves or reservations) and rights to fishing and hunting on their traditions lands, free education and a stipend for each person from the Crown each year.
The aboriginals had no concept of "king." They knew of a Creator that was active in their lives but never seen, so they assumed that the unseen King would also look after them as the Creator did. And, of course, keep promises made in writing.
What were the living conditions? A little perspective is in order here. After the Second World War, representatives of the (white) government of South Africa came to Canada to see how the Canadian government dealt with its "Indian problem." Then they went home and, following the Canadian pattern, enacted Apartheid. Apartheid was banned in South African years ago when the black skinned people vastly outnumbered the white skins and the world turned against a prejudiced government in South Africa. However, in Canada, the Indian Act still exists, though the government has made promises for many years to remove it. The United Nations has condemned Canada publicly for its apartheid regulations, to no avail. Apartheid still exists, not in South Africa, but in Canada. On "the rez."
Are "Indians" forced to stay on reservations these days? No, in Canada about half live off their home reservations. But any government benefits come only to those who live on the reserves. If you live off the reserve, even briefly--especially if you are a woman--then move back to the reserve, good luck trying to get your rights to benefits back from the government.
Now about the "What's The Matter" part of the title. What's the matter is that North American aboriginal people did not die out, as expected, which is why they were given such a "sweet deal" in the apartheid style treaties. What's the matter is that the culture of the North American aboriginal people is very, very, very different from the culture that was brought to North America from Europe. If this article were expanded to book length, it would still not be long enough to explain the many differences between the cultures of the Europeans (now white North Americans) and the aboriginals.
What's the matter is that the white governments of North America never kept the promises they made to the aboriginal peoples in legally drafted and signed treaties they drew up themselves. No aboriginal group was ever offered the chance to draft a possible treaty because they were considered by the Europeans to be inferior people, not quite human in the European sense. Not only were the conditions of the treaties in the style now known as apartheid, the governments didn't even keep the few promises they made in those treaties. Promises they made up themselves.
We are used to politicians making promises before elections, then forgetting them once the elections are over. But if we have a legal agreement with the government, we expect the government to keep its end of the bargain. The government certainly expects us to keep our end, and is prepared to enforce it with imprisonment if we don't. The government of Canada has never kept its part of the treaties it agreed to with the aboriginal people it wanted to avoid going to war with. There were no Indian wars in Canada to speak of. The aboriginal peoples had no choice but to let the white skins take over their land, exploit it with farming, with mines, with oil wells, while receiving zero in return for their agreeing to "share" that same land. Their "reserved" land, by coincidence, rarely proved to have any real value, including for hunting the animals they traditionally hunted for food, temporary shelter and clothing.
The "problem" with "our Indians" is that the white people lied, cheated, duped their treaty partners, then refused to keep even the few concessions they made in the treaties they signed to keep the peace. And the white people can't understand why their "Indians" are upset. Wouldn't you be upset?
Not only do the aboriginals not have a concept of land ownership (no one would accept ownership of the air, so why should people want to own the land when we can all share?), they don't have a word for "religion". Aboriginal people don't have a problem with belief and faith, with wars and arguments between people who believe in the same God, as whites do. They never ask "Do you believe in God?" Every one I know and have read about believes in a Creator. That's not the God of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). The Creator is a part of everything, to them. Including rocks, trees, grass, wheat, bears, snakes and people. In fact, the concept of Creator largely agrees with what physics has proven about atoms being components of everything, about energy and matter being different versions of the same thing, about everything of importance being accessible. Science doesn't agree with the concept of a supernatural, but the aboriginal people do not blame scientists for their shortsightedness. They accept what others think and choose to believe.
It's the rest of us non-natives who can't accept differences, who can't accept others who don't believe what we have been taught, who can't accept that aboriginal people believe what they can feel and experience while whites want to have mysteries based on "faith."
The problem is not with the people we white North Americans call Indians, but with us white North Americans not caring enough about others to learn about them, to see if what they believe, what they know, how they live, may be better than what we have been taught. We treasure our ignorance and want to preserve it for our children. Those who believe anything radically different from what we have been taught must surely be "inferior," so may safely be disregarded.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents, grandparents and teachers who want to grow children who do not treasure ignorance, but who embrace learning about all people so that world peace can become possible.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Showing posts with label gambling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gambling. Show all posts
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Sunday, January 31, 2010
The Right Words At The Right Time
The Right Words At The Right Time
The best life lessons are a few words on the right subject, at the right time.
- Bill Allin, Canadian life coach and author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems
My now-deceased first wife was a far better teacher than I was. I was an educator.
What's the difference? A teacher teaches a prescribed curriculum, a manageable collection of facts and skills, testable and widely accepted as part of the general education of a child. An educator grows children.
I joined the profession because I admired her skill as a teacher. I learned later that her teaching skill was greatly helped by her knowledge, which she gained as a voracious reader. I was a non-reader at the time, in fact in today's terms I would be known as functionally illiterate.
On a break during a summer job I had in my sixteenth year of life, while sitting on a factory loading dock I overheard two older men talking in the yard below. One said "I never have conversations with young people. I find that until they are at least 25, they don't know enough to talk about."
Thinking about that I realized that I knew almost nothing. I had no skills that derived from hobbies or training from my parents. I couldn't claim to know much about any subject at all.
That prompted me to start learning on a grand scale. As I knew nothing about anything, I learned everything I could on every subject I could, be it on the radio or television, as a fly on the wall while meaningful conversations were taking place among older adults, or reading cereal boxes.
Thirty years later people were calling me a human encyclopedia. I finally knew something others could respect me for. Two decades after that, I am sharing some of that with you here.
One overheard snippet of conversation changed the direction of my life.
During my grade ten year, my geography teacher bought a new Volkswagen beetle, a new import to my native Canada. While casual conversations between teachers and students in those days were few, somehow I got into a casual debate with my teacher over the merits of the VW. Based on overheard conversations from others, I took the side claiming that the Beetle was junk.
To my shock, my teacher raised the issue of his new car in our next geography class and asked me to bring forth the points I had made the previous day and add more. What I knew was more rumour than fact. I had never ridden in a VW and had seen more of them advertised on television than on the roads around my neighbourhood.
While the classroom debate added nothing to the knowledge based of my classmates about Volkswagens, the experience made me realize that teaching can be more than conveyance of facts and mastering of skills.
That teacher tried to get a shy kid to speak up in a class situation by engaging a teacher in an unplanned debate in front of the whole class. I didn't lose the debate because my teacher wanted to give me an experience I had never had before, not to squash (albeit deservedly) the poorly founded opinion one of his weakest students held.
A year or so later, in a different high school, my all-business geometry teach went off-topic in class for some reason when the subject of drinking alcohol came up. He said "If I have to depend on an artificial stimulant to get enjoyment out of my life, then I had better rethink and reformulate my life so I can get more enjoyment out of living it."
After that I understood that many people willingly accept such a poor quality of life that they need alcohol or drugs or gambling or shopping sprees or any number of other addictive habits just to make them feel better about life for a short while.
Today, by what I have learned, by what I have read, experienced and thought about thoroughly, I feel so in touch with everything that exists that I can feel higher than any drunk or junk addict all day long. My high doesn't go away and it has no backlash sobering-up period.
In 1995, a couple of years after my long-divorced wife died and my children refused to see me or let me see my grandchildren, my daughter wrote me a letter in which she said "My two daughters are well and happy. I have told them that all their grandparents are dead and I don't want to upset them by having them learn otherwise."
To know that the children I helped raise I will never see again and my grandchildren will never know the wonderful experiences available to kids who know their grandparents set me on a quest to learn something new.
Why or how could a child ever come to feel that way about a parent? To me the effect was like losing your whole family in a fire, all at once, only it was worse knowing that they would all carry on their lives without me. I had something to give that was more valuable than money.
As an educator and sociologist, I had the skills to research how kids learn and develop. I learned more than most people could even imagine.
Mostly importantly, I learned that what children learn in the first six years of their lives molds the kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives. As I was a feral child who never had any toys or experiences with other children for my first six years, I was frightened of my own kids when they were little.
I thought "I'll be better with them when they are old and I can teach them stuff I know." Their mother taught them virtually everything they learned for the first six years of life of our children.
Lo and behold, our children grew to become like their mother, not like me. I'm not sad for me so much as I am sad for my children and grandchildren. My grandkids will grow to be like their mother as she grew to be like her own mother. It's how life works.
Today we have parents who are too busy to teach important life lessons to their kids. They react when the kids are bad, but they teach little when their kids need it.
Instead they give them video games and sit them in front of the television for entertainment. Think about that. Would you want a child to grow up believing that real people in their lives are just like the people they see on television? How twisted and perverse would that be?
Teaching critically important life lessons is relatively easy and fast. In most cases it's a matter of saying each one in a few sentences and allowing the kids to talk with the adult about the lesson.
If we don't teach positive life lessons, children grow to become like the people they see on television and in video games. Look around you and think about what kids in your community are doing with their lives. Sadly, this is one case where life imitates art.
We are all the worse for it.
We need to learn how and when to do the job of parenting well.
Broken people are hard to fix. Better to give them the knowledge and skills they need to prevent them from breaking.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children the right lessons at the right times in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
The best life lessons are a few words on the right subject, at the right time.
- Bill Allin, Canadian life coach and author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems
My now-deceased first wife was a far better teacher than I was. I was an educator.
What's the difference? A teacher teaches a prescribed curriculum, a manageable collection of facts and skills, testable and widely accepted as part of the general education of a child. An educator grows children.
I joined the profession because I admired her skill as a teacher. I learned later that her teaching skill was greatly helped by her knowledge, which she gained as a voracious reader. I was a non-reader at the time, in fact in today's terms I would be known as functionally illiterate.
On a break during a summer job I had in my sixteenth year of life, while sitting on a factory loading dock I overheard two older men talking in the yard below. One said "I never have conversations with young people. I find that until they are at least 25, they don't know enough to talk about."
Thinking about that I realized that I knew almost nothing. I had no skills that derived from hobbies or training from my parents. I couldn't claim to know much about any subject at all.
That prompted me to start learning on a grand scale. As I knew nothing about anything, I learned everything I could on every subject I could, be it on the radio or television, as a fly on the wall while meaningful conversations were taking place among older adults, or reading cereal boxes.
Thirty years later people were calling me a human encyclopedia. I finally knew something others could respect me for. Two decades after that, I am sharing some of that with you here.
One overheard snippet of conversation changed the direction of my life.
During my grade ten year, my geography teacher bought a new Volkswagen beetle, a new import to my native Canada. While casual conversations between teachers and students in those days were few, somehow I got into a casual debate with my teacher over the merits of the VW. Based on overheard conversations from others, I took the side claiming that the Beetle was junk.
To my shock, my teacher raised the issue of his new car in our next geography class and asked me to bring forth the points I had made the previous day and add more. What I knew was more rumour than fact. I had never ridden in a VW and had seen more of them advertised on television than on the roads around my neighbourhood.
While the classroom debate added nothing to the knowledge based of my classmates about Volkswagens, the experience made me realize that teaching can be more than conveyance of facts and mastering of skills.
That teacher tried to get a shy kid to speak up in a class situation by engaging a teacher in an unplanned debate in front of the whole class. I didn't lose the debate because my teacher wanted to give me an experience I had never had before, not to squash (albeit deservedly) the poorly founded opinion one of his weakest students held.
A year or so later, in a different high school, my all-business geometry teach went off-topic in class for some reason when the subject of drinking alcohol came up. He said "If I have to depend on an artificial stimulant to get enjoyment out of my life, then I had better rethink and reformulate my life so I can get more enjoyment out of living it."
After that I understood that many people willingly accept such a poor quality of life that they need alcohol or drugs or gambling or shopping sprees or any number of other addictive habits just to make them feel better about life for a short while.
Today, by what I have learned, by what I have read, experienced and thought about thoroughly, I feel so in touch with everything that exists that I can feel higher than any drunk or junk addict all day long. My high doesn't go away and it has no backlash sobering-up period.
In 1995, a couple of years after my long-divorced wife died and my children refused to see me or let me see my grandchildren, my daughter wrote me a letter in which she said "My two daughters are well and happy. I have told them that all their grandparents are dead and I don't want to upset them by having them learn otherwise."
To know that the children I helped raise I will never see again and my grandchildren will never know the wonderful experiences available to kids who know their grandparents set me on a quest to learn something new.
Why or how could a child ever come to feel that way about a parent? To me the effect was like losing your whole family in a fire, all at once, only it was worse knowing that they would all carry on their lives without me. I had something to give that was more valuable than money.
As an educator and sociologist, I had the skills to research how kids learn and develop. I learned more than most people could even imagine.
Mostly importantly, I learned that what children learn in the first six years of their lives molds the kind of people they will be for the rest of their lives. As I was a feral child who never had any toys or experiences with other children for my first six years, I was frightened of my own kids when they were little.
I thought "I'll be better with them when they are old and I can teach them stuff I know." Their mother taught them virtually everything they learned for the first six years of life of our children.
Lo and behold, our children grew to become like their mother, not like me. I'm not sad for me so much as I am sad for my children and grandchildren. My grandkids will grow to be like their mother as she grew to be like her own mother. It's how life works.
Today we have parents who are too busy to teach important life lessons to their kids. They react when the kids are bad, but they teach little when their kids need it.
Instead they give them video games and sit them in front of the television for entertainment. Think about that. Would you want a child to grow up believing that real people in their lives are just like the people they see on television? How twisted and perverse would that be?
Teaching critically important life lessons is relatively easy and fast. In most cases it's a matter of saying each one in a few sentences and allowing the kids to talk with the adult about the lesson.
If we don't teach positive life lessons, children grow to become like the people they see on television and in video games. Look around you and think about what kids in your community are doing with their lives. Sadly, this is one case where life imitates art.
We are all the worse for it.
We need to learn how and when to do the job of parenting well.
Broken people are hard to fix. Better to give them the knowledge and skills they need to prevent them from breaking.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children the right lessons at the right times in the right way.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Asking About Someone's Welfare Could Change Your Life
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
- Plato
But it doesn't seem like it, does it?
Yesterday I asked a friend how he was. He replied "Can't complain. No one would listen anyway." I responded that I would listen. His retort was "Yeah, but you won't care."
Was he telling me that I didn't care about his problems, that he didn't want to divulge them to me, that he was afraid of seeming vulnerable by telling me his problems, that he didn't want to take the time to explain his problems to me because I couldn't help him? Maybe simply that he was having a bad day?
Fortunately he knew from other occasions that I did care about him and his family. But that is not the point. Did he believe that everyone is fighting his own hard battle of life and that his was no worse than that of me or anyone else?
These questions cannot be answered by anyone but my friend. However, it's important for us to remember that the most obnoxious or irritable or annoying or sad or even happy person we meet is also suffering his own serious problems.
True, some problems are worse than others. But we raise our worst problem in our own mind to the level of a critical problem in many cases. That is, no matter how severe or mild a person's worst problem is, it seems very bad to him. That's important because some people can't cope with problems at the critical level sometimes.
How people conduct their interpersonal relations show how they are managing to cope with their problems of the day.
How a person responds to a question about their welfare can tell us a great deal about their state of mind.
Given the numbers of murders, of suicides, of people on mood altering drugs and of people who can't cope with their problems to the point where they are about to commit a crime, how we interpret their reply to our question could make a great difference to that person's future.
Maybe ours as well.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make you aware of potential problems that others have so that you know when intervention is needed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Plato
But it doesn't seem like it, does it?
Yesterday I asked a friend how he was. He replied "Can't complain. No one would listen anyway." I responded that I would listen. His retort was "Yeah, but you won't care."
Was he telling me that I didn't care about his problems, that he didn't want to divulge them to me, that he was afraid of seeming vulnerable by telling me his problems, that he didn't want to take the time to explain his problems to me because I couldn't help him? Maybe simply that he was having a bad day?
Fortunately he knew from other occasions that I did care about him and his family. But that is not the point. Did he believe that everyone is fighting his own hard battle of life and that his was no worse than that of me or anyone else?
These questions cannot be answered by anyone but my friend. However, it's important for us to remember that the most obnoxious or irritable or annoying or sad or even happy person we meet is also suffering his own serious problems.
True, some problems are worse than others. But we raise our worst problem in our own mind to the level of a critical problem in many cases. That is, no matter how severe or mild a person's worst problem is, it seems very bad to him. That's important because some people can't cope with problems at the critical level sometimes.
How people conduct their interpersonal relations show how they are managing to cope with their problems of the day.
How a person responds to a question about their welfare can tell us a great deal about their state of mind.
Given the numbers of murders, of suicides, of people on mood altering drugs and of people who can't cope with their problems to the point where they are about to commit a crime, how we interpret their reply to our question could make a great difference to that person's future.
Maybe ours as well.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make you aware of potential problems that others have so that you know when intervention is needed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Adapt To Change Or Suffer Disengagement
Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
- Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)
Yet many people act as if it does. Or they deny what they know to be true, in the hope that a miracle will happen to change truth to what they want it to be.
Witness how many people fervently believe that the universe and eveything in it was created in six earth days, as is stated in Genesis of the Abrahamic bibles. Scientific evidence can prove beyond a doubt that the universe took billions of year to come to its present form and, indeed, is still changing. These people are troubled by the teaching of the results of scientific study because it contravenes what they believe.
The present administration in the USA believes it can end the war in Iraq and bring the country to a meaningful place at the table of international wisdom and concensus by killing off or imprisoning those who want the US military to leave their country. This despite the fact that President Bush has no idea how to bring his dream for Iraq into reality and considerable doubt exists as to whether the majority of people in Iraq want that goal anyway. In his quest, Mr. Bush spends billions of dollars each day of taxpayer money on his military, claiming that he is protecting his citizens from an enemy that wants nothing to do with the US (other than financial aid until it rebuilds what the US military destroyed).
Many people buy lots of lottery tickets each week or visit gambling casinos or events despite the fact that many more people have destroyed their lives and wrecked their families than have ever "won big." Many reasearch projects have shown that winning a huge amount of money is apt to permanently destroy the life of the winner and his or her loved ones because they have no idea how to manage the demands and responsibilities having that wealth entails.
Many people who suffered terribly when their first marriage failed blamed their spouses for weaknesses and faults, then went out to find second spouses with those same weaknesses and faults, only to have that marriage fail as well. They have trouble accepting that it is them that must change, not the people they choose to marry then try to change.
Truth and reality are not so mysterious for those who insist upon adapting themselves and their thinking to what is needed to accommodate the circumstances of their lives and the realities of what has been proven by others (and often by themselves).
People turn to some devastating and destructive devices and strategies for managing their activities in order to avoid facing up to evidence that disagrees with what they believe. In many cases they harm themselves and those they love because they will not change what they believe.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, trying to put the truth into perspective and self-deception into history.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)
Yet many people act as if it does. Or they deny what they know to be true, in the hope that a miracle will happen to change truth to what they want it to be.
Witness how many people fervently believe that the universe and eveything in it was created in six earth days, as is stated in Genesis of the Abrahamic bibles. Scientific evidence can prove beyond a doubt that the universe took billions of year to come to its present form and, indeed, is still changing. These people are troubled by the teaching of the results of scientific study because it contravenes what they believe.
The present administration in the USA believes it can end the war in Iraq and bring the country to a meaningful place at the table of international wisdom and concensus by killing off or imprisoning those who want the US military to leave their country. This despite the fact that President Bush has no idea how to bring his dream for Iraq into reality and considerable doubt exists as to whether the majority of people in Iraq want that goal anyway. In his quest, Mr. Bush spends billions of dollars each day of taxpayer money on his military, claiming that he is protecting his citizens from an enemy that wants nothing to do with the US (other than financial aid until it rebuilds what the US military destroyed).
Many people buy lots of lottery tickets each week or visit gambling casinos or events despite the fact that many more people have destroyed their lives and wrecked their families than have ever "won big." Many reasearch projects have shown that winning a huge amount of money is apt to permanently destroy the life of the winner and his or her loved ones because they have no idea how to manage the demands and responsibilities having that wealth entails.
Many people who suffered terribly when their first marriage failed blamed their spouses for weaknesses and faults, then went out to find second spouses with those same weaknesses and faults, only to have that marriage fail as well. They have trouble accepting that it is them that must change, not the people they choose to marry then try to change.
Truth and reality are not so mysterious for those who insist upon adapting themselves and their thinking to what is needed to accommodate the circumstances of their lives and the realities of what has been proven by others (and often by themselves).
People turn to some devastating and destructive devices and strategies for managing their activities in order to avoid facing up to evidence that disagrees with what they believe. In many cases they harm themselves and those they love because they will not change what they believe.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, trying to put the truth into perspective and self-deception into history.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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